Lamannia Warlock Feedback - Official Thread

[Cordovan]

Make a Warlock - play with it - let us know what you experience!

This is a good thread for general thoughts and discussion. If you have specific feedback, feel free to visit our Lamannia Warlock Forum here. (https://www.ddo.com/forums/forumdisplay.php/279-Warlock-Feedback)

[Touriste]

deleted problem solved thx to Varg :)

[richieelias27]

Initially I was concerned about targeting issues when it was stated that projectiles would not "lock on". I was worried that 99% of my shots would hit my feet.

It appears after testing that projectiles do actually "lock on" just like bow/xbow attacks do (but can still miss). Thank you for this!

Fear immunity from Aura of Courage does not appear to be working. I was feared even though I had it on.

Metamagics do not work on warlock eldritch blasts. This is probably fine though given the speed of attacks, the fact that you can run around at full speed while attacking, and the fact that the attacks are all free.

edit: Also, stunning blast seems to work all the time even if they make the save (on non-bosses). I hit something with it, it did not get the stun debuff, but still did nothing for 12 seconds.

[Artagon]

Crowd controls still auto-remove themselves after about 15s in Epic content. This makes Dominate Monster and other charms remain extremely underwhelming.

[GoldyGopher]

I created "Richard" as a half-elf Warlock following a default path. It wasn't my plan it just sort of happened, and appears to be bugged.

I gotta admit I am disappointed that Turbine is letting players automatically level up their Warlocks on the first weekend (and use veteran status) if there are bugs and issues to find you think Turbine would want people to actually play the class.

Richard is a 32 point build (8,8,16,10,8,18) and I am playing him as a first life FTP/Premium character and running the adventures in Korthos without XP boosts.
I want to be up front and say I do not believe Turbine has mad the best choices in their design of the Warlock Class and I would have done it very differently.

My first thought after playing 30 minutes was what a boring character to play. a sentiment that repeated itself for the next 2 plus hours. Target mob, hold mouse button down, cast a half-dozen time, rinse and repeat. With no SP management and no timers and no ... all the class is run and spam Eldritch blasts.

I wondered why Turbine would choose SP for Warlocks as opposed other mechanisms and after playing for three hours I really wonder why now. The only logical reason would be for multi-classing and IMHO that should be the last reason and a very poor reason to do so. That might change is I pick up more spells, but really for the sixty or so spell points I used in each quest (out of 180 to 250) what's the point?

I have a love hate relationship with the toggle turning on Eldritch blast.
About 1/4 of my Eldritch blasts against actually targets went into never-never land. No clue why, I suppose it could be hit chance but nothing in the logs and I don't see any dice rolls.
When standing toe to toe with a mob many of Eldritch blasts missed it is as if the game couldn't figure out where I was aiming. This is why I have a love hate relationship, because to toggle off the blasts beat down the mob, toggle on to target the next mob toggle off as it gets to close... You see where this is going? Now think bats.

The first eldritch blast in a chain takes a moment to cast, the rest take a second while holding down the mouse key.
Invocations are supposed to be longer to cast than spells so I am not sure I like that. The damage, at least through level 3, is in significant. I would prefer to see the "casting" time take longer and the invocations do more damage.

I'll write more later, I plan to play again later this evening.

[Drakos]

I created "Richard" as a half-elf Warlock following a default path. It wasn't my plan it just sort of happened, and appears to be bugged.Yes, from the Known Issues" list - •The Warlock path is not working correctly in character generation. A 28-point-build that does not select the "Customize" icon will be placed onto the path.

[GoldyGopher]

Yes, from the Known Issues" list - •The Warlock path is not working correctly in character generation. A 28-point-build that does not select the "Customize" icon will be placed onto the path.

I pointed out that I should be a 32 point build that only got 28 points worth... Which is not exactly what the know issues statement says. .

[The_Human_Cypher]

Some typos from the Warlock screens:

1) Class description during character build "endless inflict magical damage" should be "endlessly"

2) The sample stats page is messed up during character build. Wisdom 16, Charisma 8 for example

3) Fey pact: "of the settling of age-old grudges" should be "or the settling of..."

[Delacroix21]

Honest feedback on the warlock Aura tree (melee warlock tree).


The aura pulse is too slow to be usefull dps wise, also this tree was touted as a great tree for melee warlock multiclasses but it is not, its horrible on a multiclass as the aura cooldown is too long on a multiclass. Make the aura every 2 seconds by default with no further reduction from the cores.

[richieelias27]

I created "Richard" as a half-elf Warlock following a default path. It wasn't my plan it just sort of happened, and appears to be bugged.

I gotta admit I am disappointed that Turbine is letting players automatically level up their Warlocks on the first weekend (and use veteran status) if there are bugs and issues to find you think Turbine would want people to actually play the class.

Richard is a 32 point build (8,8,16,10,8,18) and I am playing him as a first life FTP/Premium character and running the adventures in Korthos without XP boosts.
I want to be up front and say I do not believe Turbine has mad the best choices in their design of the Warlock Class and I would have done it very differently.

My first thought after playing 30 minutes was what a boring character to play. a sentiment that repeated itself for the next 2 plus hours. Target mob, hold mouse button down, cast a half-dozen time, rinse and repeat. With no SP management and no timers and no ... all the class is run and spam Eldritch blasts.

I wondered why Turbine would choose SP for Warlocks as opposed other mechanisms and after playing for three hours I really wonder why now. The only logical reason would be for multi-classing and IMHO that should be the last reason and a very poor reason to do so. That might change is I pick up more spells, but really for the sixty or so spell points I used in each quest (out of 180 to 250) what's the point?

I have a love hate relationship with the toggle turning on Eldritch blast.
About 1/4 of my Eldritch blasts against actually targets went into never-never land. No clue why, I suppose it could be hit chance but nothing in the logs and I don't see any dice rolls.
When standing toe to toe with a mob many of Eldritch blasts missed it is as if the game couldn't figure out where I was aiming. This is why I have a love hate relationship, because to toggle off the blasts beat down the mob, toggle on to target the next mob toggle off as it gets to close... You see where this is going? Now think bats.

The first eldritch blast in a chain takes a moment to cast, the rest take a second while holding down the mouse key.
Invocations are supposed to be longer to cast than spells so I am not sure I like that. The damage, at least through level 3, is in significant. I would prefer to see the "casting" time take longer and the invocations do more damage.

I'll write more later, I plan to play again later this evening.

EVERY class at level one is a boring nightmare.

Try playing once you get some decent enhancements and spells. I built a Warlock based around the tainted scholar depravity mechanic and it is absolutely nuts how many things you need to keep track of. Stunlock the hard hitter, heal self, heal allies, CC those over there with confusion. All while kiting at full speed and spamming eldritch blasts.


Honest feedback on the warlock Aura tree (melee warlock tree).


The aura pulse is too slow to be usefull dps wise, also this tree was touted as a great tree for melee warlock multiclasses but it is not, its horrible on a multiclass as the aura cooldown is too long on a multiclass. Make the aura every 2 seconds by default with no further reduction from the cores.

Keep in mind that the Aura damage is *in addition* to your melee dps or whatever other actions you are performing. The normal Eldritch blasts do not allow other actions to be performed at the same time. Every two seconds would be like having a permanent, free wall of fire.

[KingKoz]

After creating a new Warlock (lvl 20 warlock/8 epic) toon, leveling him up, completing destinies I decided it was time to find a quest to check out the Warlock. I decided to run Lords of Dust. So far, a major issue (in my opinion) is that I can't open breakable doors like the Altar rooms. With a scepter in each hand he casts no matter what I am targeted on, floor, breakable box etc, but will not swing the weapons. So, I get to the 1st altar room and can't open the door since the eldritch blast won't break the door.

Koz

[richieelias27]

After creating a new Warlock (lvl 20 warlock/8 epic) toon, leveling him up, completing destinies I decided it was time to find a quest to check out the Warlock. I decided to run Lords of Dust. So far, a major issue (in my opinion) is that I can't open breakable doors like the Altar rooms. With a scepter in each hand he casts no matter what I am targeted on, floor, breakable box etc, but will not swing the weapons. So, I get to the 1st altar room and can't open the door since the eldritch blast won't break the door.

Koz

Turn off eldritch blast. You will then swing normally.

[Severlin]

After creating a new Warlock (lvl 20 warlock/8 epic) toon, leveling him up, completing destinies I decided it was time to find a quest to check out the Warlock. I decided to run Lords of Dust. So far, a major issue (in my opinion) is that I can't open breakable doors like the Altar rooms. With a scepter in each hand he casts no matter what I am targeted on, floor, breakable box etc, but will not swing the weapons. So, I get to the 1st altar room and can't open the door since the eldritch blast won't break the door.

Koz

Did you turn off your Eldritch Blast toggle?

Sev~

[KingKoz]

Turn off eldritch blast. You will then swing normally.

AH HA! Thanks...good workaround. Hopefully that's not how it is suppose to work.

Koz

[richieelias27]

AH HA! Thanks...good workaround. Hopefully that's not how it is suppose to work.

Koz

That is how it's supposed to work. Can't swing with your weapon and use eldritch blasts at the same time.

Perhaps they could implement a "hold shift to swing" option?

[PsychoBlonde]

AH HA! Thanks...good workaround. Hopefully that's not how it is suppose to work.

Koz

That's exactly how it's supposed to work.

[Requiro]

After 2-3 hours of play from level 1 (starts from Grotto :D)

First and the most impression: Very, very irritating chain of the Eldritch Blast. First of the chain is SO much delayed, that is almost unplayable. I will trade all the sequence just for shoot when I press attack button. Please, do something about it. Made shoot first in the chain as fast as arrow, and THEN made other 2 in the chain in slower rate.

Overall this class looks like ranged toon, and I feel like I play ranged toon (I do not test Enlightened Spirit yet).
At level 1 - Kite all the time. There was just too little damage from Eldritch Blast. And no fun.
At level 2 - With additional Pact damage, and temporary HP - I can stop Kite. And where fun begins.
At level 2-3 - When I get Blast shape Chain, there is no more challenge in game. With Khortos gear Kobolt Assault with no HP lose. That is fun, but could be boring for someone. Not for me :-)
At level 4 - With hire, Devil Asault with only temporary HP lose.

So far, on low levels class seems like broken. Tomorrow will test more in higher levels.
Without this VERY irritating delay in first shoot on the chain, very easy class to play. Hope that will not be boring at high levels.

Some bugs:

- Free targeting with Eldritch Blast not work well. Without any target, it fire always strait. Not like arrows that fly where I pointed.
- A little freeze (half a second) in moving speed when I press fire button with Eldritch Blast
- Get Arcane Spell Failure with Light armor. What is strange, there is no Arcane Failure for spell from Tainted Scholar Core abilities.
- Metamagic won't work with Eldritch Blast
- I got Reflex save with Force damage not only Sonic damage from Fey Pact.
- Clickies give me bonus HP from Feigned Health abilities
- Blast shape Chain do not destroy breakables (very annoying... )

Some ideas:
- There is no need for to choice Class Feats on Pact bonuses, when level up, if there is only one to choice. But maybe you plan made choice in the future? Then ok.
- Blast shape Chain is too loudly.
- This is cool idea that Eldritch Blast visual effect is change depends of the Shape/Damage. But please, made Sonic damage less... ugly :)

[Sierim]

A few things I've noticed so far, which may be intentional for all I know:


Eldritch blast looks fine out of combat, but in combat it feels very slow, to the point that if not firing into a crowd, I can expect maybe 20% accuracy if the target is moving at an angle from more than 10 meters away. I generally wish it moved as fast as Eldritch Chain bounces.


The range feels tiny (about a fireball's range, I think). This may be related to the blast's movement speed, as I can't see it hitting anything moving at the range I expect it to reach. Nevertheless, due to their purpose as basic attacks, the blasts don't feel like they should go out so quickly.


The charge-up animation, while fine in appearance, could be sped up a bit. It feels like a long pause in combat if you don't continuously fire. This is mainly a perception thing, not an underpowered issue.


Eldritch chain doesn't destroy breakables. I assume this one is intentional, but I was not expecting it at all. Swapping forms to destroy breakables is definitely frustrating for me.


Every other animation seems to always fire two shots (this may change as BAB increases; I haven't checked). Sometimes I just want to fire one shot. Is this intentional?

[pawpaw2000]

I made two warlocks to test out the Great Old One pact and Fey pact, with plans to eventually make a third for fiend pact. So far, it seems like an interesting class. The main issue I noticed, however, was that fey pact adds sonic damage, which is effected by the perform skill rather than the spellcraft skill. Perform is not a warlock class skill, unlike spellcraft. It also does not work as well with some Arcane Sphere epic destinies, namely Draconic Incarnation.

My suggestion would be to change this to lightning damage instead of sonic, which would still fit the pact thematically while also working better with the warlock class.

[nibel]

- Free targeting with Eldritch Blast not work well. Without any target, it fire always strait. Not like arrows that fly where I pointed.

It is like the Savant SLA. Always annoyed me that I could not jump and cast fireball SLA aiming at the ground (instead of a monster). I have no idea if it is fixed on live (Have not played my sorc for a year or two).

[PermaBanned]

So far, a major issue (in my opinion) is that I can't open breakable doors like the Altar rooms. With a scepter in each hand he casts no matter what I am targeted on, floor, breakable box etc, but will not swing the weapons. So, I get to the 1st altar room and can't open the door since the eldritch blast won't break the door.
Did you turn off your Eldritch Blast toggle?

Sev~Really? Why not just make the blast effect Doors & Breakables? Kinda silly to think that all a Kobold in Waterworks has to do to safely hide from the Blast of a lvl 28 Warlock is jump into a clay pot or wooden crate...

Just make the blast effect objects like it's a fireball - for both convenience and the sake of making sense.

[Rasputin]

Wanted to add my input after playing a level 7 VIP warlock.

I noticed the spell failure when casting spells wearing light armor, notably the starter Warlock level 7 gear.

I found it tremendously irritating that my chain blasts did not destroy breakables.

I was confused when taking feats because the metamagic feats made no mention of whether they would affect Eldritch Blast or not. Ended up wasting feats on Maximize and Enlarge.

I thought the blasts needed a greater range. Allowing them to be affected by Enlarge might help.

More to come, I'm sure.

[Hipparan]

I played both as a fiend pact warlock and a fey pact warlock, and I really enjoyed both! I would just like to bullet a few things that I would like to see changed for future Lamannia builds:


Changing the sound effect of the chain eldritch blast so we aren't blasted in the ears when there's a couple of warlocks together.
Misty Escape from the fey pact does not show a buff for the invisibility, and so one cannot see the timer on it.
Sonic damage for the fey pact blast is nice since only few monsters are immune to it, but it doesn't work all that well considering the reflex saves of some of the higher level enemies. In addition, I would recommend possibly a change in the type, maybe into electricity, to better fit the Draconic Incarnation tree. This way, it would be as viable as the other warlock pacts in the Draconic Incarnation tree.
The speed of the blasts seems to be a little slow. When an enemy is running sideways it's pretty much impossible to hit it with an eldritch blast until it stops. This wouldn't be so bad for soloing as enemies will be running at you, but I can imagine it would be a nightmare in parties or raid groups where people are spread out, i.e. wilderness areas.


All around though, I very much enjoyed playing warlock. Good job to the devs!

[DrWily]

Welp, got myself some testing done on Lammy Land.

First off, I like how the EBs change color when you toggle the Pact damage.

Second, a most of the Clicky attacks from the trees seem to un-toggle EB without turning it off when it is on. And whenever it's turned on or off it turns off the Chain Blastshape, which means I need to wait 3+ seconds of no Blasting to get it back on.

I just tested a (mostly) pure Lock, when I get back on later tonight I'll try a multiclass Lock instead

[axel15810]

Just got done testing out all the different blasts.

The first thing that stood out is how slow the animations are. Feels awkward to use, and if you're not holding the button down it's easy to oversample.

Otherwise I was impressed with the graphics. Overall it looks very cool, just feels slow and unresponsive to me in combat. If you could double the speed but half the damage across the board to compensate it would feel a lot better.

[decease]

There are few things that might be better other wise imo.

1st. Pact damage, Pact should give bonus normal EB damage, while toggle convert your EB to specific type of damage. these should act as EB essence instead of add alternate type of damage.(also pact damage are dc base.. not good... would like them remain the same as EB, they are EB after all.)

2nd The tree need to be more specific, a dc tree should focus on dc casting, a EB tree should focus on eb shape and essence.. and a melee tree should focus on melee ability. not messing all around. those hireling/pet buff enhancement need to go, they are useless.

3rd Spell mat must go, would be better if you can make new spell. if you are not going to make new spell i doubt they worth 1350 tp. at least i wouldn't consider getting this class at that price, by far this is not much relate to warlock.. felt more like playing arcane archer or sorc...

4th EB damage is decent for heroic level, but for end game content they fell short.. please make sure they are epic ready before you release them..

5th Eb must use a common type of spell power.. in ddo force spell power are linked to repair, sonic link to perform, pos/neg link to heal.. and elemental link to spellcraft. would be nice if eb always use the same source reguardless of the essence used. (force is the obvious option)


Here is my suggestion.

Enlightened Spirit added/modify enhancement:

Darken one's own luck- Add Cha mod to all save(luck bonus)

eldritch glaive- summon a two hand glavie(staff) that deal 1d6 force damage 3 caster level. (cap at CL 30 deal 11d6 + cha mod damage) [copy paste flame blade from druid spell]

Resist Energies- make this a perm buff on the warlock.

Displacement SLA- make this a perm buff on warlock.



Tainted Scholar added/modify enhancement:

Planar Power- add that at t3 it also chance you 5% chance to gain 30 temp sp (cool down 10 second)

Feigned Health- cast spell on self or allies? more likely never.. just make this on cast please. also add a cooldown of 15~30 second

Stunning Blast/Confusion/Mass Confusion- please list their dc or at least give the equation. i went on lam and get the best gear possible. but still fail over 80% of the time in epic hard..(level 28 content). for heroic though they are fine

Eldritch Power: as a t5 enhancement... it add 1d6 eb damage...do you realize that on the other tree t4 can give 3d6 alone?? comeon...


p.s. personally i think you should drop all dc casting for good. it is harder to build up the dc on a warlock then a sorc. and sorc have way bigger sp pool. warlock is not suppose to be dc caster or instant kill imo...

edit: the turth is it is very hard to reach meaningful dc for dc casting.. and their sp is rather small. (bard's cc mostly came from their song..also spellsinger regen sp)

[fmalfeas]

Deciding to test from 'blank slate' status, I assumed brand new person, maybe with some wiki reading behind them, no in-game resources. Human Warlock, Korthos Start. Due to Korthos start and no ship buffs available, or passable potions or anything of that nature, Resist Energy was my level 1 spell.

It can't be used. Says that my ability isn't high enough. Int is at 12, Charisma at 18, which means most likely it's checking for wisdom, as the cleric version of the spell.

[Artagon]

3rd Spell mat must go, would be better if you can make new spell. if you are not going to make new spell i doubt they worth 1350 tp. at least i wouldn't consider getting this class at that price, by far this is not much relate to warlock.. felt more like playing arcane archer or sorc... I wouldn't mind seeing spell components get dropped from the class entirely.

4th EB damage is decent for heroic level, but for end game content they fell short.. please make sure they are epic ready before you release them.. Agreed.. Faster particles, a little extra range, and push up the spell power scaling for the regular blast and the chain.

Here is my suggestion.

Enlightened Spirit added/modify enhancement:

Darken one's own luck- Add Cha mod to all save(luck bonus) Determination bonus.. so that it doesn't stack with paladin.

eldritch glaive- summon a two hand glavie(staff) that deal 1d6 force damage 3 caster level. (cap at CL 30 deal 11d6 + cha mod damage) [copy paste flame blade from druid spell] No way this is happening at this late date.. especially when the aura gives you a melee range option that ALSO lets you use melee combat and has the best burst damage of either of the trees we can play with via the cleaves.

Tainted Scholar added/modify enhancement:

Stunning Blast/Confusion/Mass Confusion- please list their dc or at least give the equation. i went on lam and get the best gear possible. but still fail over 80% of the time in epic hard..(level 28 content). for heroic though they are fine I got my DC up to about 70 on mine. In ToEE on EN I hit about 70% of the time... past lives, more customized gear, ship buffs, yugo pots, and a +6 tome would probably allow me to get another 5-6 DC... Is 75 DC enough to be viable in ToEE EH?

Eldritch Power: as a t5 enhancement... it add 1d6 eb damage...do you realize that on the other tree t4 can give 3d6 alone?? come on. While I could argue that this tree also provides 4d4 pact damage, I would probably agree that +1d6 damage in a T5 does seem pretty low, considering all the buffs that other T5s get.. like the crossbows in Mechanic, for example. I would like to see a little extra something in this enhancement. possibly another d4 pact damage as well? Maybe extra crit chance?


p.s. personally i think you should drop all dc casting for good. it is harder to build up the dc on a warlock then a sorc. and sorc have way bigger sp pool. warlock is not suppose to be dc caster or instant kill imo...

edit: the turth is it is very hard to reach meaningful dc for dc casting.. and their sp is rather small. (bard's cc mostly came from their song..also spellsinger regen sp) Honestly, I found myself using very very little SP, though that could be because the cure serious SLA isn't currently using SP (please don't change that, leave it at 0 sp please!). What were you spending your SP on?

Responses in SALMON!

[axel15810]

I also still think giving Enlightened Spirits cleric radiant bursts is a bad design choice. I really wish you all would come up with something different. I hate this homogenization of cleric abilities in that tree. Please try and be creative and think of something different. Just any healing ability there that isn't the exact same thing as cleric radiant bursts would make me much happier.

[Deathdefy]

The neg-levelling blast shape has a 100% proc rate where it should be 10%. It also affects Red names. Haven't tested on Purples, but suspect it would.

'Aura of Courage' should probably just be on full-time rather than a toggle since it's not mutually exclusive with anything, doesn't attract threat, and is wholly beneficial.

The different tiers of Resist Energy SLA make no real difference.

Eldritch blast felt like pretty low damage. Lantern Ring will be obligatory. So will shiradi I suspect. I'd allow metamagics on it or something.

This will sound harsh but to me it felt like a low spell point arcane with a ranged attack rather than something particularly new. I still hope solutions to infinite casting are still being tossed around.

[decease]

No way this is happening at this late date.. especially when the aura gives you a melee range option that ALSO lets you use melee combat and has the best burst damage of either of the trees we can play with via the cleaves.


The eldritch glaive is a melee weapon to use while running the aura. it does much less damage compare to normal EB and are not affect by spell power/pact/enhancement. it is just something awesome warlock have access to. also this weapon is inferior to all end game weapon, but will act as an universal dr breaker for warlock and multiclass.(think of Celestia)

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/6a/ca/df/6acadf66346e034ec82d8dbc01bc3e47.jpg

p.s. this is nothing new, no need new code. just copy and paste with tiny bit of alteration will do. we already get flame blade after all..




I got my DC up to about 70 on mine. In ToEE on EN I hit about 70% of the time... past lives, more customized gear, ship buffs, yugo pots, and a +6 tome would probably allow me to get another 5-6 DC... Is 75 DC enough to be viable in ToEE EH?

not sure how you come up with 70 dc.. last i check those warlock sla do not have display dc? or you have 70 dc in every school?? i doubt those are evocation school.. and god knows which level of spell they were consider as.


I also still think giving Enlightened Spirits cleric radiant bursts is a bad design choice. I really wish you all would come up with something different. I hate this homogenization of cleric abilities in that tree. Please try and be creative and think of something different. Just any healing ability there that isn't the exact same thing as cleric radiant bursts would make me much happier.

warlock have an invocation called Path of Shadow which is basically shadow walk + virgo..

[Artagon]

not sure how you come up with 70 dc.. last i check those warlock sla do not have display dc? or you have 70 dc in every school?? i doubt those are evocation school.. and god knows which level of spell they were consider as..
The confusion SLAs state that they are Enchantment SLA and their DC is 10 + warlock level + cha mod. As they specifically state that they are 'Enchantment' SLA I assume that Enchantment DC increasers affect the DC. As such, I had 10 + 20 (lvl) + 24 (58 cha) + 6 item + 3 feats + 3 magister + 3(5) Tainted Scholar = 69(71) DC - I split the difference on tainted spellcasting.

[HatsuharuZ]

I used Vet II to make a Fiend Pact Warlock, and equipped standard gear. Then I made use of the dojo and starts blasting helpess kobolds.

1) The class feats such as "Fiendish Resilience" have to be dragged to a "Class Feat" feat slot during level up. This is...odd, since there is only one class feat you can choose.

2) E.B. Shape: Chain tool-tip claims to deal 1d6 force damage.

3) Is "Bewitching Blast" supposed to be an Essence or just a toggle? This needs clarification.

4) Martial Weapon Proficiency not is not mentioned in the E.S. tool-tip on the enhancements UI. This needs to be lower! Both bards and wizards get this ability before level 7. Both Bards and Wizards have more spell slots than the Warlock, and they both have access to the spell "Master's Touch", just like Warlock does.

5) I feel that "Utterdark Blast" should not be a prerequisite for anything. It's entirely unrelated to the two enhancements above it.

6) Warlock's Vet II starter gear does not come with any helm or gauntlets. Also, the ring with the "Burning Hands" clickie is a bit silly since Warlocks have Eldritch Blast.

7) When both E.B. and Pact damage are toggled on, the damage numbers and types for each blast are displayed vertically. I.E., they are stacked on top of one another. This makes it hard to differentiate between blasts, and is a waste of space. Please make it so that they display horizontally, like weapon damage does.

8) My Fiend Pact Warlock was only able to choose fire resistance for his innate elemental resistance class feat. Is this intended? It would be great if we could choose from multiple damage types, like FvS does.

9) The SLAs in the "Tainted Scholar" enhancement tree do not seem to display a DC formula, or tell what spell level they are.

10) The description that states that compares the Warlock to a Cleric during character selection needs work. Warlocks are more like mercenaries than priests.

11) Some warlock spells need spell components, like other spellcasters do. One of the big draws in 3rd edition was that Warlocks didn't need the kind of inventory management that other spellcasters had to use.

12) I saw repair spells on the list. Interesting.

13) Any chance of allowing Constitution to be an alternate spellcasting stat for Warlocks? It would be a great boon for a d6 HP per level class that goes into melee combat!

[fmalfeas]

Regarding the Burning Hands ring, it's kinda nice to have that as a freebie to tote around until it's time to do Siegebreaker, if you don't wanna spend plat on a Fireball wand for lighting up those tents.

[decease]

The confusion SLAs state that they are Enchantment SLA and their DC is 10 + warlock level + cha mod. As they specifically state that they are 'Enchantment' SLA I assume that Enchantment DC increasers affect the DC. As such, I had 10 + 20 (lvl) + 24 (58 cha) + 6 item + 3 feats + 3 magister + 3(5) Tainted Scholar = 69(71) DC - I split the difference on tainted spellcasting.

hmm where you get that equation from?? really wanna know..

http://s2.postimg.org/fvdo8gmix/dcc.jpg

p.s. i check everywhere on forum but couldn't find any evidence of the actual dc...please shed some light?



edit: just wanna say most of the warlock sla are useless, and are meant to be useless..

http://s11.postimg.org/eobc10dw3/poordc.jpg

unless you can reach 70 dc with these ability.

10+warlock level + cha mo. which means you need 40 cha mod or 90 charisma score. might be possible for some, but i sure wouldn't waste the time for it..

[Artagon]

hmm where you get that equation from?? really wanna know...
I logged back in to look at it, it appears that you are indeed correct. I suppose I saw one calculation and assumed they were all calculated the same. That being said, it appears that my confusion DC was probably more like 56, since the highest level spell they have is level 6 and they do use heighten (which I had)

[HatsuharuZ]

Neither "Binding Chain" or "Howl of Terror" display a DC formula, but they do display the DC. This makes it hard to tell if the DC is correct, though.

[gwonbush]

I'd assume the DC is 10 + Spell level + Any relevant DC modifiers by school.

[Phantasma2015]

Would create one and test it IF I could but guess what:
The issue I stated about the failed login STILL persists!

Nice job guys...stellar...really...

[TheGuyYouKnow]

i played around for about 2 hours, my main concern is warlock has very little potential to get better. after you have maxed shiradi and have obtained relevent spell power/crit items the class just stops progressing, and far behind other classes at that.

there arnt enough useful feats for a class that has 1 attack, i ended up taking mental toughness 3 times just for 1% crit chance, max and emp because they work with shiradi

they start in arcane sphere epic destinies for theming but there is very little to no synergy there.

i found trying to beat dcs futile

the visuals look good, except the hands and weapons in said hands(holding an axe through your head).

the sound is too much, just like repeaters

the class feels like a lot of rushed concepts with no relevence to the current game and bad execution with just a whole bunch of copied abilities



if you would like to play warlock on live right now just roll a wizard with magic missiles sla and take no damage spells. you are there

[Delacroix21]

Keep in mind that the Aura damage is *in addition* to your melee dps or whatever other actions you are performing. The normal Eldritch blasts do not allow other actions to be performed at the same time. Every two seconds would be like having a permanent, free wall of fire.

I am not sure how else to say this but big freaking whoop. Melee warlocks will not be competitive with other dps classes, and using the aura on a multiclass will still stink. My point still stands.

[Rautis]

I also still think giving Enlightened Spirits cleric radiant bursts is a bad design choice. I really wish you all would come up with something different. I hate this homogenization of cleric abilities in that tree. Please try and be creative and think of something different. Just any healing ability there that isn't the exact same thing as cleric radiant bursts would make me much happier. While they do get some cleric abilities they will still play completely differently than clerics. They for example can't learn healing spells from their spellbook afaik. This means they're not anywhere near Clerics in healing ability. It seems like this tree is meant to allow fleshy Warlocks to self heal. Power wise I think the burst is rather balanced tier 5 option considering their inability to also otherwise deal with neg levels or stat damage. It also goes well with Enlightened Spirit aura theme. Ofcourse it would be nice to have an ability specially designed for this but I'm fine with burst copy.

[fmalfeas]

I am not sure how else to say this but big freaking whoop. Melee warlocks will not be competitive with other dps classes, and using the aura on a multiclass will still stink. My point still stands.

When they spec heavy into Enlightened, they aren't a 'DPS Class' anymore. They're a hybrid tank/support/DPS class, that focuses fairly strongly on the tank/support side of things. Kinda like a Sacred Defender paladin, rather than a vanguard or chalice.

The constant pulses from the eldritch blast aura gives them ever-growing AoE aggro, on top of any acquired through Intim/weapon hits, and their aura-blast 'cleaves' further boost that, and their heal/neg level removal burst and healing SLA gives them some staying power even if everyone else is busy.

If you're wanting DPS Melee Lock, I think you're looking at more Souleater than Enlightened Spirit.

[richieelias27]

I am not sure how else to say this but big freaking whoop. Melee warlocks will not be competitive with other dps classes, and using the aura on a multiclass will still stink. My point still stands.

And a Warlock multi should be able to compete with a pure DPS barbarian in melee.... Why? Exactly?

[Mast3rR0b]

I'd not say compete, as they are probably not meant to, but right now the best way to deal damage as a melee Warlock (Enlightened Spirit) is to twist in Prism and Double Rainbow from the Shiradi ED, while staying in Divine Crusader. Literally.

[fmalfeas]

I wonder if Adrenaline would shut down the aura? If not, then you could Fury it. If so, you could always Dreadnaught Blitz it, or even synergize that light damage and go into Angel...

I wonder if the light component added to the aura would cause the counters to grow for 'casting light spells'? If so, that'd mean a free counter every 2 seconds.

Another wonder about Enlightened that I may have to test myself since it's antithetical to a lot of people's playstyle - Do you have to be swinging your weapon to get the aura pulse blasts? Or could you turtle-up with Levik's Defender and Shield Block stuff, while the mobs wail on you futilely and your aura tears them down?

[decease]

When they spec heavy into Enlightened, they aren't a 'DPS Class' anymore. They're a hybrid tank/support/DPS class, that focuses fairly strongly on the tank/support side of things. Kinda like a Sacred Defender paladin, rather than a vanguard or chalice.

The constant pulses from the eldritch blast aura gives them ever-growing AoE aggro, on top of any acquired through Intim/weapon hits, and their aura-blast 'cleaves' further boost that, and their heal/neg level removal burst and healing SLA gives them some staying power even if everyone else is busy.

If you're wanting DPS Melee Lock, I think you're looking at more Souleater than Enlightened Spirit.

The thing is, melee warlock don't have anything relate to melee...unless you splash, but if you do your aura will proc every 4-8 second..hell even at 2 sec the damage is way too low to kill anything...

Also they have poor save, low ac,low health with half decent PRR/MRR...so they aren't really tacky... And they aren't exactly good at healing either... I doubt you could make take out of it..

The burst may sound great, they can be empowered and maximized...but...the damage is not great with rather long cool down.

P.s. Overall, melee warlock have bit and pieces... But never anything in whole to work

[HatsuharuZ]

I'd assume the DC is 10 + Spell level + Any relevant DC modifiers by school.

"Binding Chain" and "Howl of Terror" are not standard spells. Since they're not on any spell list, I can't tell what spell level they are.

Also, Howl of Terror does not appear to be a "fear effect" for the Draconic Incarnation ability that gives a +3 bonus to fear effects.

[Seikojin]

Did you turn off your Eldritch Blast toggle?

Sev~

Blasts should handle breakables. I can see a bug with chain blasts, but that wouldn't be a bad perk. :)

I am refraining for later. But the feat spells and the slas in trees make me happy.

Some people were getting 8k hits with their blasts. So there may be top tier combos with 20 lvls, gear, and destinies. However if the blast is doing 8k per hit, that may be a problem. I know it is fire and light they were using, and it was most likely crits. I will try to get a repro build going sometime this weekend to get the combination that outperforms everything else in the game for free.

[XxJFGxX]

Utterdark Blast: Eldritch Essence Stance: Your Eldritch Blast base damage is now Evil instead of Force. 1 rank 2 AP

(Evil Damage from spells is usually boosted by alignment-based Spell Power, and normally deals full damage to enemies regardless of enemy alignment, though particular enemies may have special defenses.)

Nice ham fisted attempt in introducing the Utterdark Blast but it's not the Utterdark Blast whatsoever. In case you devs forgot, this is the Utterdark Blast and Enervating Shadows in PnP 3.5 edition of D&D.


Enervating Shadow: Gain total concealment in dark areas and impose a Strength penalty on adjacent living creatures.

Utterdark Blast: Target must make Fortitude save or gain two negative levels.

[Iriale]

Devs, if you wanted to create a sorcerer with the same role of a wizard, why called warlock instead of sorcerer II? This is not a warlock. Thanks, turbine, for definitively kill the wizard. It was dying, so why mind giving it the coup of grace.

The wizard has to prepare a substantial amount of damage spells, with which do a pitiful damage and he will be drained of mana. Warlock dps is free. So actually it has more spells than the wizard, and of course, than the sorcerer.

Devs, do you realize that a warlock with fey pack has ALL the important spells (ie, that work in epic, who cares about the rest, when are not working in epics xd) and the same instantkills than a wizard? mass hold monster, irresistible dance, dancing otto sphere, web, and blind (only in mod) are THE CC spells of a wizard (and nothing more, because the rest of spells does not work), and the fey warlock has all, plus access to confusion and stunning SLAs. Instantkills? Wail, finger of death and circle of death are the bread and butter of the wizard, and warlock has all. But in addition, the warlock dps is free (which is the horror of the wizard, when his dps is so low and so inefficient in spell points)

Buffs? The warlock that I did in lammania with the fey pact had blur, displacement, greater heroism, deathblock, protection from elements, with free light armor proficiency and cure moderate wounds SLA. In other words, the same buffs that a wizard, better PRR and MRR (by armor and enhancements), and much better healing than a wizard not undead, not warforged.

DPS? It is definitely better than the wizard dps xD.

In conclusion: say that the warlock has fewer spells than a wizard or sorcerer is a lie. It actually has more, comparatively speaking.

Seriously, designers, what will be the point of playing a wizard? Because I do not see it. If you have no time to make an original class, don't do this terrible copy. I thought that was the reason for not introducing psionics. And now you come to us with such pitiful copy and paste? Designers, your rush is killing the game. You don't have time, and the second expansion ended up being two adventure packs, not an expansion. You don't have time, and ToEE has proved to be an unfortunate and unfinished product. You don't have time, and the warlock will not be a new class, just an unfortunate copy that devalues existing classes.

This is not a new class. A new class doesn't have the same spells and role than a pre-existing class, with better added. This is not a warlock. A warlock does not have the same spells than a wizard or sorcerer, is NOT a primary spellcaster.

At least I have more clear about what to do with my VIP subscription. Regrettable, turbine, regrettable.

Ah- when I used the shield spell, it gave to my warlock arcane spell failure. Weird bug. It was on a warlock with fey pact.

[FallingIcicle]

After trying the warlock out (with the great old one pact), here are some of my thoughts.

Things I liked:

- The way your hands glow when EB is toggled on is pretty cool. The EB bolts also look pretty cool.

- Eldritch Chain is the best thing since sliced bread.

- I was actually pleasantly surprised at how many spells and other options I had in the end. It was enough to fill 4 action bars, which I think is plenty for a warlock. I was expecting a lot less from what I had read. I just wish so many of your spells weren't chosen for you.

- I was very pleased to find jump and teleport on the warlock spell list. There are so many times I wish my artificer had those spells.

Things I didn't like:

- Eldritch blast feels really slow and unresponsive. I'd click and nothing would happen for like 2 seconds, and other times I'd click once and shoot two bolts. The blasts themselves also travel really slowly, making it hard to hit moving enemies and just feeling like they lack oomph. The casting animation is also pretty bad. It looks like a really drunk person trying to do karate chops in the air. The bast toggles also take a few seconds to activate, which is really annoying. They should activate instantly.

- Eldritch blasts really need to be able to destroy breakables!

- The tooltips need to provide a lot more information about what works and doesn't work with eldritch blast. That fact that it can't benefit from metamagics, for example, should be mentioned. I also found myself really confused as to what gear I should pick, since it's not clear what benefits EB and what doesn't.

Minor Nitpicks:

- Having to select the class feats for my pact (such as thought shield), even though they are the only choice available, was a nuisance.

- Feather fall doesn't really feel like the greatest spell for a class that gets so few spells. Can't tainted scholars get something else instead? Something a little more... tainted? Ditto for Greater Heroism (it's a good spell, it just doesn't feel appropriate for a "tainted" scholar).

- Stanch just doesn't look like an ability I'd want to use.

- Entangle seems like a really strange spell for the great old one pact. Great old ones are alien horrors, not tree-hugging nature types. Any chance we could get Evard's black tentacles instead?

Bugs I noticed:

- When you turn on your great old one toggle, your EB turns green, which is pretty cool. But when you activate eldritch chain, it becomes purple again even though it's still doing acid damage.

- I picked Summon Monster IV, but when I went to cast it the box opened that lets you pick the creature, but nothing was inside, so I couldn't cast the spell.

- Summon Monster IX requires level 9 spell components even though it is a level 6 spell for warlocks.

Overall, the class is off to a great start. I really look forward to playing one when they go live!

[Trillea]

Made a shiny new warlock last night and ran through Korthos. I was using the fey sonic damage on them. Blasted through everything on elite with the barb hireling, neither of us died once.

There are 2 problems I have with Eldritch blast: First is that the initial "windup" when you start attacking is too slow. To be able to respond quickly to an enemy coming around the corner I had to back off, otherwise they were on me before I could even start damaging them.

Second is that the d6 used for the eldritch blast is a standard d6, not the 1d3 +3 that magic in DDO is traditionally. This would go a long way to making me happy if these were addressed.

The only other small thing that I noticed is that the eldritch blast has a hard time breaking the frozen corpses in Misery's Peak. I submitted a bug report on this one.

[Augon]

I played a couple of different variants of the Warlock yesterday.

While the Warlock did have a different feel for me, I still feel its not different enough. Some changes I think would much improve things (this is taken from a discussion between Varg, myself and a couple of other players on Lam chat).

1. Scratch the spell point pool - No spell points. One of the reasons I've seen given for SPs was multi-classing: I don't think class features should take multi-classing in to account. Build the class as pure and then people like me will devise ways to multi-class it as is.
2. Create a "feat" that Warlocks get at level 1 that allows them to cast warlock spells for zero spell point cost and zero material components
3. Extend the cool down for warlock spells to 10x regular - maybe even disallow quicken
4. make all buff spells "Mass" - this is simply to make buffing a reasonable process due to number 3.

Thanks

[axel15810]

I am not sure how else to say this but big freaking whoop. Melee warlocks will not be competitive with other dps classes, and using the aura on a multiclass will still stink. My point still stands.

Melee Warlocks should not be competitive with true melee classes like barbarians in terms of melee DPS since they have so many more options other than melee.

[Hipparan]

I played both as a fiend pact warlock and a fey pact warlock, and I really enjoyed both! I would just like to bullet a few things that I would like to see changed for future Lamannia builds:


Changing the sound effect of the chain eldritch blast so we aren't blasted in the ears when there's a couple of warlocks together.
Misty Escape from the fey pact does not show a buff for the invisibility, and so one cannot see the timer on it.
Sonic damage for the fey pact blast is nice since only few monsters are immune to it, but it doesn't work all that well considering the reflex saves of some of the higher level enemies. In addition, I would recommend possibly a change in the type, maybe into electricity, to better fit the Draconic Incarnation tree. This way, it would be as viable as the other warlock pacts in the Draconic Incarnation tree.
The speed of the blasts seems to be a little slow. When an enemy is running sideways it's pretty much impossible to hit it with an eldritch blast until it stops. This wouldn't be so bad for soloing as enemies will be running at you, but I can imagine it would be a nightmare in parties or raid groups where people are spread out, i.e. wilderness areas.


All around though, I very much enjoyed playing warlock. Good job to the devs!

I wanted to add something up that I'd like the devs to see. I know that the devs are aware currently of the issue where the chain shape change is not the same color as the pact chosen when pact damage is toggled on, but I discovered something else. People on Lamannia are reporting to me that my eldritch blast is the default blue/purple color, even though on my screen it is clearly visible as the sonic colored blast from the fey pact.

[decease]

Melee Warlocks should not be competitive with true melee classes like barbarians in terms of melee DPS since they have so many more options other than melee.

yes, like bard shouldn't be able to compete with melee class, since they have so many more options other then melee?

p.s. also cleric/fvs/ek/ranger/druid.. any class with casting ability

[FallingIcicle]

1. Scratch the spell point pool - No spell points. One of the reasons I've seen given for SPs was multi-classing: I don't think class features should take multi-classing in to account. Build the class as pure and then people like me will devise ways to multi-class it as is.
2. Create a "feat" that Warlocks get at level 1 that allows them to cast warlock spells for zero spell point cost and zero material components
3. Extend the cool down for warlock spells to 10x regular - maybe even disallow quicken
4. make all buff spells "Mass" - this is simply to make buffing a reasonable process due to number 3.

Someone in another thread suggested an idea that I thought was really cool. That is to give warlocks a very tiny spell point pool, but give them a superior echoes of power feature that improves with warlock level. They would gain sp from echoes of power faster and have an increased sp cap from it (something like 12 + warlock level or maybe 2 x warlock level). That would be an interesting way of simulating the at-will spellcasting warlocks have in pen and paper.

[dlsidhe]

Warlock 1: Tainted Scholar Primary, Drow Racial and Enlightened Spirit Secondary, Fey Pact

Korthos: Gods, eldritch blast feels slooow. Decent damage, but SLOOOOW. BUG: No gear in the end chest of the opening cave - I got a stack of potions and a starter healing kit. Picked up chain shape, and it became a field of death. Awesome.

LEVEL UP!

Ran through Lords of Dust in Shiradi. This isn't even right. I mean, I'm not complaining (I was running at level 28 in a HN level 21 quest - it should feel like running a hot knife through butter), but this is fun.

Issues:

Spell Components. Really? Warlocks shouldn't need spell components - if the class is using SP instead of casting for free, at least remove the need for material components.

I find things breaking me out of blasting in an eldritch manner, like using Darkfire. I think there needs to be a clear explanation of what you can and cannot do when eldritch blasting.

WARLOCK 2: Melee Half-Elf Enlightened Spirit.

Meh. Feels like it needs a group to shine. It's okay, but not the Tainted Scholar death cannon.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

Initially I was concerned about targeting issues when it was stated that projectiles would not "lock on". I was worried that 99% of my shots would hit my feet.

It appears after testing that projectiles do actually "lock on" just like bow/xbow attacks do (but can still miss). Thank you for this!

Fear immunity from Aura of Courage does not appear to be working. I was feared even though I had it on.

Metamagics do not work on warlock eldritch blasts. This is probably fine though given the speed of attacks, the fact that you can run around at full speed while attacking, and the fact that the attacks are all free.

edit: Also, stunning blast seems to work all the time even if they make the save (on non-bosses). I hit something with it, it did not get the stun debuff, but still did nothing for 12 seconds.

Good to know about the targeting. Thx for posting this.

[Rusty_Can]

"Binding Chain" and "Howl of Terror" are not standard spells. Since they're not on any spell list, I can't tell what spell level they are.

Druids can cast Howl of Terror (http://ddowiki.com/page/Howl_of_Terror).

[Gurdomli]

My first impressions and bugs:

Only tried a Pure Tainted Scholar so far.

First of all, cool class. The Eldritch Blast really brings something unique to the game, and the tainted scholar really makes me feel like an empowered caster. The lack of spells does force you to aim towards a kind of build, although they're mosty either Crowd Control enchantment or Necromancy.

I do feel like that the spell points should completely go, and entirely work on the depravity mechanic. Warlocks DON'T have limits on spells, period. Make them a longer cooldown if you want, or have a larger echoes of power pool, but bottom line, Warlocks never run out of juice. Also, make unique spells for them like Druids and Artficers, I mean at least chilled tentacles which is iconic to Warlocks.

Bugs:

1) Arcane Spell failure in light armor. That's obviously a bug since Warlocks always could cast in light armor

2) When trying to attack with eldritch blast in town, makes the movement animations all jerky

3) Feels like Heighten spell feet is mandatory to offset the lack of spell penetration for level 9 spells becoming level 6 (I believe that's right, please correct me if I'm wrong)

[axel15810]

yes, like bard shouldn't be able to compete with melee class, since they have so many more options other then melee?

Absolutely, should be this way with bards. It already is with melee clerics/fvs and eldritch knights. And I disagree with how good the devs made swashbuckler DPS. Just because the devs turned a buffing/support/jack of all trades class into a melee DPS class doesn't mean I have to be OK with them doing the same with warlock should they decide to.

[decease]

Absolutely, should be this way with bards. It already is with melee clerics/fvs and eldritch knights. And I disagree with how good the devs made swashbuckler DPS. Just because the devs turned a buffing/support/jack of all trades class into a melee DPS class doesn't mean I have to be OK with them doing the same with warlock should they decide to.

This is DND, this is how things should be. In real DND there are no such as "pure build" prestige class is another class you take ontop of the base class. But in ddo they fail to do that.. and this is how they translate stuff.

p.s. you can't do both dc casting while maintaining top dps. to melee you will need various of melee feat, the same for dc casting. A class can do this much, but a build usually can't do everything. at least not on EE. (except some crazy fighter/wizard splash. thanks to bonus feat and past life. but then that is how things are, Elminster himself have fighter level. )

[Requiro]

After another couple of hours (from level 4 to 18), some fresh impresion

First of all, that class is powerful. Even maybe OP. Don’t have much time to test it. But… :

At level 4 - Gladewatch Outpost Defense Normal (6) – No problem with Hireling.
At level 6 - Haunted Library Normal (8)/Hard (9) – no problem at all.
At level 12 - Assault on Summerfield Normal(13)/Hard(14)/Elite(15) – same thing.
At level 14 – Delirium Normal(15)/Hard(16) – same
At level 18 – Eye of the Titan, Normal(19)/Hard(20) – no problem.

All this with very week gear. Mostly using EB damage.

I guess that with hireling every Heroic quest, can be done over the level. I don’t know if this is intentional. But… this is fun :-)
After that… Enhancement Tree are week. They are cheap in AP points (and this is good) but give so little in return. I will give more details in proper subtree (Link: https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460769-Lamannia-Tainted-Scholar-Feedback-Official-Thread?p=5621726&viewfull=1#post5621726 )

Another bugs:
- We can’t cast Crushing Despair from Level 6 Tainted Scholar core on level 6 – maybe because we don’t have spells from level 3 on level 6 (we got them on level 7), but this is very strange.
- In Enlightened Spirit Tree, Tier 4 require only 15 AP spend instead of 20
- Summon Monster VIII and Create Undead spell doesn’t work. When you hit them, there is no summon to choice. Only black box.
- Summon Monster IX require level 9 components to cast.

Wai or Bug:
- Eldritch Chain seems that chain to random enemies in range.

[Rasputin]

Made a new character, designed to be pretty close to what my current swashbuckler will TR into for my three Warlock lives.

2 Rogue
6 Bard
12 Warlock

8 Epic. Kitted him out with stuff I already have, such as Orchard and Three Barrel gear. Missing level 24 Cove stuff but whatever. Also, no +6 Supreme tome.

This time, I went up the Enlightened Spirit tree. 12 AP in Elf, 16 in Swashbuckler, 16 in Warchanter, 36 in E. Spirit.



Flipped on my various auras and headed into Lords of Dust. I know that I am only dealing with 12 levels of Warlock here, but the eldritch aura is completely inconsequential when my character is used to hitting with my weapon for ~120 + lots of extras and the aura is only doing around 60-80 every three seconds. I estimate that in the time it takes for the aura to pulse once, doing ~70hp to everyone around me, I have hit one target 10 times for many thousands of damage with my weapon (counting frequent crits and shield bashes) That's with 137 Force spellpower and 117 light spellpower.

I'm not really sure it's worth the effort. The healing ability is alright, but my normal Bard + rogue + wizard has no problems self healing between Divine Crusader, Cure Serious Wounds, and cocoon. Plus my wizard levels gave me bonus feats with that build that I don't get here, so no quicken or extend.

Color me underwhelmed so far.

PS. Inadvertently hard-targeted a death knight and tried to heal myself with Break Forth. Got the error message "Invalid target", just like the Clerics used to get with their burst.

[Hiponic]

In creation when when reading about whats important You guys say Cha is most important..
But in the stat screen above it you guys have Wis at like 16 and 8 Cha lol

I actually dont read that bottom part when looking at stuff I just glance at the top see where points need to be.

Def should fix before releasing. Any one new or someone who glance and go's like my self is gonna roll a super gimp lol

[Drathsiddh]

First up, let me get this strait: I love Warlocks.
But playing them, they just seem like a Wizard using a bow or something. Yeah EB is super cool, the graphics and all are amazing (though there is a bug that when you change the shape into Chain, it goes back to the same purple thing, but thats not such a biggy) but the feel isn't there. It's probably because of the copy-paste spell list because apart from occasionally casting a Web or Wail or Confusion, your just holding down EB, kinda like a ranged toon, but without the need for cycling through certain abilities.
Change the spell list a bit, or better, add NEW spells. Don't rush this. Creating a new class is a big thing for you and majority of the DDO players, so make sure you can say, at the end of the day, 'I gave it my best'.

[Requiro]

Forgot to mention, but for EB users, there is no great feats to take.

No Skill Focus: Spellcraft for additional 3% damage for EB
Maximize and Empower is kind of waste - don't work with EB, and only with some SL-a

So what's left?
- Mental Toughness for 1% critical chance for EB
- Improved version for the same.
- Skill Focus: Perform for Fey Pact Sonic damage

And that it. Rest is for improvements of CC
- Spell focus x2
- Spell Penetration x2
- Heighten metamagic

Or survivability
- Force of Personality

On the other hand, I miss some great feats for ranged toon: Manyshoot, Precise Shoot, PBS, Rapid shoot ect.

Some fast suggestions:
- 2% critical spell chance for Improved Mental Toughness
- Add Skill Focus: Spellcraft
- Add Perform as the Class skill if you choice Fey Pact (inherent Fey Pact feat ability)
- NEW FEAT: Toogle, works like Precise Shoot but for the Ranged Magic Attacks (I guess that EB is this kind of attack) . Free for Warlock on level 4 (or 6)
- Free feat on level 3 - Eschew Materials (Warlocks should cast spells without material component at all)

[Mast3rR0b]

I will speak my mind on the class' spell design.. I don't like it much. I feel right now Warlocks are just a mix of existing classes. Bard, Sorc, Wiz. They get a miz of everything, without having a proper class identity.

Why do i have spells on a Warlock? Why do i have an SP bar?

For multiclassing? Bah, if i multiclass in a caster, then i'll have that caster Sp bar. If i multiclass in another class then i don't need said bar. Do i want to have Cocoon for the epics? Then i take the feat Magical Training.

Warlocks have Invocations. Spell-like abilities. That's what makes them apart from other casters. Why should i buy the Warlock, if he has a similar pew pew to the Sorc or MM spamming Wiz, and the same CC/instakill spell of a Wiz? Both classes probably do the job better.

I want something different. Take away the sp bar. Let us take a few spells, more or less like it is now, and make those Spell-like abilities that cost 0 sp (obviously). Double, even triple, or more, their cooldown. Maybe make the cooldown dependent on how many metamagics are applied to the spell-like.

Keep existing spells code, but please for the love of god, rename them for the Warlock. Why should a Warlock have Entangle? Is he/she a Druid? Or a Ranger? No, we're talking about Warlocks! Name it Curse of Entanglement, and keep entanglement code and animation! Done! The class has flavor, everyone is happy and you did minimal work. Same for the other spells. Heck, hire me and i'll gladly do it for you xD

Eldritch Glaive: please, just please. You already have the code in the Druid's scimitar. Let melee Warlocks have flavor!

[Gurdomli]

I will speak my mind on the class' spell design.. I don't like it much. I feel right now Warlocks are just a mix of existing classes. Bard, Sorc, Wiz. They get a miz of everything, without having a proper class identity.

Why do i have spells on a Warlock? Why do i have an SP bar?

For multiclassing? Bah, if i multiclass in a caster, then i'll have that caster Sp bar. If i multiclass in another class then i don't need said bar. Do i want to have Cocoon for the epics? Then i take the feat Magical Training.

Warlocks have Invocations. Spell-like abilities. That's what makes them apart from other casters. Why should i buy the Warlock, if he has a similar pew pew to the Sorc or MM spamming Wiz, and the same CC/instakill spell of a Wiz? Both classes probably do the job better.

I want something different. Take away the sp bar. Let us take a few spells, more or less like it is now, and make those Spell-like abilities that cost 0 sp (obviously). Double, even triple, or more, their cooldown. Maybe make the cooldown dependent on how many metamagics are applied to the spell-like.

Keep existing spells code, but please for the love of god, rename them for the Warlock. Why should a Warlock have Entangle? Is he/she a Druid? Or a Ranger? No, we're talking about Warlocks! Name it Curse of Entanglement, and keep entanglement code and animation! Done! The class has flavor, everyone is happy and you did minimal work. Same for the other spells. Heck, hire me and i'll gladly do it for you xD

Eldritch Glaive: please, just please. You already have the code in the Druid's scimitar. Let melee Warlocks have flavor!

Well said :)

[GeoffWatson]

I've only tested Warlock at low levels, but the Eldritch Blast seems very slow.

Does it speed up a lot at high levels?

Regular weapon attacks are a LOT faster than EB, and do more damage.

What feats improve EB?
Just Mental Toughness line for 1% crit?

[Xerio]

just like the melee auto attack is slow in lower levels, so is the EB. it does speed up at higher levels.
Though I will agree that the delay between blasts seems a little long

[Requiro]

I've only tested Warlock at low levels, but the Eldritch Blast seems very slow.

Does it speed up a lot at high levels?

No, at all.



Regular weapon attacks are a LOT faster than EB, and do more damage.


Attacks yes, are faster - but so far EB do a lot more damage with Eldritch Chain, especially on low levels. Weapons do more damage on higher levels because...


What feats improve EB?
Just Mental Toughness line for 1% crit?

... because this. Weapons get a HUGE boost from feats. while EB, only 2% Critical chance for 2 feats (Mental Toughness line) and 3% more damage for Fey Pact from Skill Focus: Perform.

That’s why (no speed progress and no feats), on higher levels, EB it's not even close to weapon DPS.


(...) it does speed up at higher levels.(...)

No. The only way to speed EB up, is Core 5 (Level 18) ability from Tainted Scholar Tree. (+10% speed)

[Augon]

Someone in another thread suggested an idea that I thought was really cool. That is to give warlocks a very tiny spell point pool, but give them a superior echoes of power feature that improves with warlock level. They would gain sp from echoes of power faster and have an increased sp cap from it (something like 12 + warlock level or maybe 2 x warlock level). That would be an interesting way of simulating the at-will spellcasting warlocks have in pen and paper.

When I first read that, I didn't like it.
But as I think about it more, I do see where that might work.

But I still feel that it should be zero spell points. It just seems like it should be like that. I don't bring that thinking from playing Warlocks in the past, The last time i played D&D was with AD&D 2nd ed. I've never played a warlock until Friday and in the previous threads leading up to Warlock I did not understand why all the fuss over spell points. Now I understand, the class screams to be different. Zero spell points and limitation on how often spells can be cast makes the most sense.

It also screams for unique spells. I agree with what another poster said above, I encourage the Dev team to take your time on this. Go ahead and take the time to create or revamp spells for this class properly. Figure out a way to remove the blue bar entirely, even if it means all the spells become either feats or SLA.

[richieelias27]

When I first read that, I didn't like it.
But as I think about it more, I do see where that might work.

But I still feel that it should be zero spell points. It just seems like it should be like that. I don't bring that thinking from playing Warlocks in the past, The last time i played D&D was with AD&D 2nd ed. I've never played a warlock until Friday and in the previous threads leading up to Warlock I did not understand why all the fuss over spell points. Now I understand, the class screams to be different. Zero spell points and limitation on how often spells can be cast makes the most sense.

It also screams for unique spells. I agree with what another poster said above, I encourage the Dev team to take your time on this. Go ahead and take the time to create or revamp spells for this class properly. Figure out a way to remove the blue bar entirely, even if it means all the spells become either feats or SLA.

Agreed. The best way to deal with it in my mind is 0sp SLA's managed with cooldowns. Honestly I find myself just slapping heavy armor on my Warlock and ignoring the spellbook entirely. The spells they do have in there are mostly worthless and are outperformed by the SLA's they do get. I would SO MUCH rather see a wider variety of blast essences. Get rid of the spellbook, in my opinion.

They have this great idea and implementation (in my opinion) of the eldritch blast, but then they short-changed it by taking the safe road and mixing in the spell mechanic from all the other casters. I mean, I understand why they did that, fear of the new mechanic failing or not being popular I guess... but it sort of watered down the entire class. I feel like it would be better served by taking the mechanic that makes the Warlock new and different, and expanding on that. Make the class all about swapping to different essences/shapes to utilize different damage types and crowd controls. Also, instead of ASF (since you'd lose the spellbook) just make armor heavier than light (or medium) slow down the attack speed of eldritch blasts.

TLDR: Lose the spellbook, replace with blast essences and/or SLA's

[dlsidhe]

So, I took a fairly decently geared (thanks, Dojo!) level 10 Human Tainted Scholar into VoN3 solo on Normal.

Why normal? Because VoN3 is a moderate challenge at level solo; even slightly above level, it can be tricky. I brought one cleric hireling, which normally negates the difficulty - but, given the AI issues, is kind of a handy way of upping the challenge. ;)

For comparison: VoN3 Heroic Normal was a fun solo run for me on a FvS Evoker. Basically, fast, easy, high XP run where I'm never in any real danger.

Warlock was...different. Being incredibly squishy meant multiple near-brushes with death (especially with the Cleric actively not-healing!), but the damage output was higher via EB. I got through it, but the short-range of EB required getting closer to beholders than I'd like normally, and I couldn't get Phantasmal Killer to land on anything reliably. So, actually, pretty well balanced. EB might mean eternal damage, but unlike a wizard or sorc you have to get up close vs. ranged kill with a ray spell, or using an AA or Mechanic where you never have to be in danger at all.

There is one thing, though, that's a huge balance issue - the Chain Blast Shape. There doesn't seem to be a cap on how far the chain can jump, or how many targets it can hit. One of those needs to be fixed, since the chain hit enemies that I hadn't even aggro'd yet because I was up a hall and around the corner from them, but there was a clean line from my target to them.

Other than that, I'm actually not seeing balance issues - just a whole lot of fun.

[Calonderial]

Agreed. The best way to deal with it in my mind is 0sp SLA's managed with cooldowns. Honestly I find myself just slapping heavy armor on my Warlock and ignoring the spellbook entirely. The spells they do have in there are mostly worthless and are outperformed by the SLA's they do get. I would SO MUCH rather see a wider variety of blast essences. Get rid of the spellbook, in my opinion.

They have this great idea and implementation (in my opinion) of the eldritch blast, but then they short-changed it by taking the safe road and mixing in the spell mechanic from all the other casters. I mean, I understand why they did that, fear of the new mechanic failing or not being popular I guess... but it sort of watered down the entire class. I feel like it would be better served by taking the mechanic that makes the Warlock new and different, and expanding on that. Make the class all about swapping to different essences/shapes to utilize different damage types and crowd controls. Also, instead of ASF (since you'd lose the spellbook) just make armor heavier than light (or medium) slow down the attack speed of eldritch blasts.

TLDR: Lose the spellbook, replace with blast essences and/or SLA's

Agreed, I could do without the spellbook, just make 0 point mass buff SLA's with long cooldowns. Also the EB seems a bit clunky and slow to respond.

[Requiro]

(...)

There is one thing, though, that's a huge balance issue - the Chain Blast Shape. There doesn't seem to be a cap on how far the chain can jump, or how many targets it can hit. One of those needs to be fixed, since the chain hit enemies that I hadn't even aggro'd yet because I was up a hall and around the corner from them, but there was a clean line from my target to them.

(...)

From my testing:
- There is cap for the range. This is about as far, as you can shoot. This is a real big circle, with the center of the targeted enemy.
- There is always 2 other targets, but shoot randomly. And if you hit multiple EB at once it looks like you hit everyone, not just 2 other targets. Testes especially on kobolds in Dojo.
- If there is any other enemies in Chain range, it will be attacked. No matter if YOU can see that enemy. Thus sometimes you grab aggro enemies from far away. Looks well when fight against teleporters (like Devils)

[maddong]

I'm sure people have come up with suggestions for doing the invocations but here is what I would do with what we have done already (looking at 5e warlock for reference).

Take the bard spell points and divide them by 4 or 5 as their base spell points (since a level 20 warlock only gets 4 castings of their spells per day).

Add invocations as bonus feats.

[redoubt]

Did you turn off your Eldritch Blast toggle?

Sev~

Why doesn't the blast break the door?

[dunklezhan]

Why doesn't the blast break the door?

Agree. My expectation would be that single target blast shouldn't knock down doors anymore than shooting at it or hitting with scorching ray would, but that it would break individual breakables. Further, I would expect AOE Blast should work like fireballing* breakables or doors.

*I would not necessarily expect AOE blast to light/extinguish torches in Necro 4 however, unless it was doing extra fire or cold damage from somewhere too.

[dlsidhe]

From my testing:
- There is cap for the range. This is about as far, as you can shoot. This is a real big circle, with the center of the targeted enemy.
- There is always 2 other targets, but shoot randomly. And if you hit multiple EB at once it looks like you hit everyone, not just 2 other targets. Testes especially on kobolds in Dojo.
- If there is any other enemies in Chain range, it will be attacked. No matter if YOU can see that enemy. Thus sometimes you grab aggro enemies from far away. Looks well when fight against teleporters (like Devils)

So in the three-blast chain, you can hit up to 9 enemies..okay, that actually matches up and makes sense. Scratch my previous issue, devs!

[edrein]

Melee Warlocks should not be competitive with true melee classes like barbarians in terms of melee DPS since they have so many more options other than melee.

By that logic we should nerf the Swashbucklers into the ground.

[edrein]

Biggest issue I've seen is HP. While everything proposed has said a d6 HP per level, I've noticed in game it is actually d4 following the Wizard/Sorcerer progression. This certainly needs to be changed as currently the HP numbers are rather low.

[decease]

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ulosnECCvmc/hqdefault.jpg

1ST pact should scale with character level not warlock level. this will make multiclass viable while helping warlock getting ready for epic.

2ND pact should give normal EB damage bonus, not specific alternative damage. Pact should act as an EB essence, when toggle it will convert all your EB damage to specific type of damage. (fey: sonic, Fiend: Fire, Great old one: Acid)

3RD Pact ability need to get addressed~~ not all pact should grant new spell, especially those useless one.

4TH regardless of which essence you use, your EB will always use force spell power and kinetic lore.








http://www.gamer-printshop.com/cbg/fey-portal-thumb.jpg
Fey:


Level 1 warlock bonus ability
Fey Pact: You gain 1d4 eb damage every two character level, and gain blast essence:Brimstone Blast
Brimstone Blast: Convert all your EB damage to fire damage.


Level 2 warlock bonus ability
Beguiling Defenses: You gain +1 save/character level against enchantment(+30 save against enchantment at level 30)


Level 6 warlock bonus ability
Misty Escape: Ddoor SLA


Level 12 warlock bonus ability
Dark Delirium: "Dominate Person" SLA


Level 16 warlock bonus ability
Fey Presence: No fail "Mass Suggestion" SLA (cooldown 5 minute)







https://36.media.tumblr.com/5ecc82d01f0baac667b5d9c062c31d4a/tumblr_morihzkeNz1rfmguzo8_400.jpg
Great Old One


Level 1 warlock bonus ability
Ancient Pact: You gain 1d4 eb damage every two character level, and gain blast essence:Vitriolic Blast
Vitriolic Blast: Convert all your EB damage to acid damage


Level 2 warlock bonus ability
Thought Shield: You gain +1prr/mrr every character level(cap at 20), Also gain feat: "Force of Personality"


Level 6 warlock bonus ability
Entropic Ward: You gain 1% dodge for every 3 character level(10% dodge at 30)


Level 12 warlock bonus ability
Awakened Mind: Mass confusion SLA


Level 16 warlock bonus ability
Create Thrall: PERMANENTLY make one none boss your willing lackey(no save), It will follow you through the entire quest but will not leave quest with you. (cool down 5 minute)







http://940ee6dce6677fa01d25-0f55c9129972ac85d6b1f4e703468e6b.r99.cf2.rackcdn.c om/products/pictures/149584.jpg
Fiend


Level 1 warlock bonus ability
Fiend Pact:You gain 1d4 eb damage every two character level, and gain blast essence:vibrant Blast
vibrant Blast: Convert all your EB damage to Sonic damage.


Level 2 warlock bonus ability
Dark One's Own Luck:You may now add your Cha mod to all your save(divine grace)


Level 6 warlock bonus ability
Dark One's Blessing: Whenever you kill an enemy you gain a damage shield equal to Character level + charisma score


Level 12 warlock bonus ability
Fiendish Resilience: you gain 1 Dr/silver for every two character level. (dr 16/silver at level 30), also 1 resistance to fire for every character level


Level 16 warlock bonus ability
Hurl Through Hell: you howl to paralyze all enemy around you (no save) (cooldown 5 minute)

discuss here: https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460858-Suggestion-to-make-pact-right!!

[Myznar]

I also found some issues with eldritch blast (chain enhacement)

1st I think the reach of the chain is too long, I believe is a bit overpowered too, at least at low lvls.

2nd Its to noisy and annoying in long terms, kinda the klank klank (AKA pew pew) form artificers, I hope the warlocks get somehow a silencer for spells lol.

[1Soulless1]

Hey sev can we get the sound changed to this ?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49jKoMbJyEo

[Xerio]

Hey sev can we get the sound changed to this ?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49jKoMbJyEo

uh.. no. could you image how flippin annoying that would get. FAST.. HA Ha ha ha HAAAA haadoookin! ha ha hah a aha haa haadookein! every 4 seconds.. no thanks

[Rhysem]

Absolutely, should be this way with bards. It already is with melee clerics/fvs and eldritch knights. And I disagree with how good the devs made swashbuckler DPS. Just because the devs turned a buffing/support/jack of all trades class into a melee DPS class doesn't mean I have to be OK with them doing the same with warlock should they decide to.

A fine take for PnP, but that's water under the bridge for MMOs. Hybrids who are only 90% as effective as the dedicated class version of them have no place in a MMO -- why take the hybrid when you could have your pick of dozens or hundreds (depending on which game you play) of "the real deal"?


Back to warlock...

With just a little poking I got to do; I think the enlightened scholar cleaves come in too hot, but never get better -- they're "take this while leveling to 20" abilities. Since they aren't (really) a melee attack, you have to improve them like spell damage and that's hard to do, whereas the melee cleaves are easy to improve (get a better weapon/more str/better crit profile/...).

The aura AoE feels underwhelming. Higher cores really need to take it down to every 2 seconds, or ideally every 1 second. Better yet would be to always make it fire off every second, and raise the damage though the cores, rather than decreasing the time. Same (theoretical) DPS, but practically speaking more useful DPS, especially when mobs run, decide to climb the walls, etc.

[SealedInSong]

Tainted Scholar and Souleater are both powerful and flavorful. Not much to say there, I think they are well-done. I agree with others that there could be more flavor in terms of (at least) renaming spells, figuring out a way to completely do away with spell points as a warlock mechanic, and other general concerns, but that's not what I want to address in this post.

ENLIGHTENED SPIRIT
My problem here is that it was tied with the tree (Souleater) I was most excited to play, and yet it feels as weak and underutilized as Eldritch Knight, which is another gish tree that spends more time *merely* making a caster *suck less* at melee, rather than giving them an interesting playstyle that feels distinct from a fighter with some spells at his/her disposal.

ELDRITCH AURA
I thought this was fine, but in practice, as Rhysem said, I'd actually much rather have this proc often with lower damage than less often with slightly more damage.

Start this out with proccing every 2 seconds, and raise damage later.

It was most useful when I would draw the aggro of lots of mobs, but that really doesn't seem like what most warlocks would want to do consider HP d6 and light armor proficiency. Sure, you could multiclass, but I think it's poor design to make trees that are inherently better as MCs.

10 AP, class level 6: Shape Vestments: While wearing Light Armor, you gain +10 Maximum HP and +5 MRR. While wearing Medium Armor you are proficient with, you gain +20 Maximum HP and +10 MRR. Passive: Your Eldritch Aura now affects enemies every 4 seconds.
In this tier, add something like +X% damage but still proccing every 2s.

Again, DDO is a game of speed. There's a reason SWF, swashbucklers, and thousands of shuriken are our best bets in end game. I'd rather do 1 damage 5 times in one round, than 5 damage once in one round.

My counterexample would be rogue mechanics who can get away with a little bit of "slow cannon" effects, but that's a ranged effect so it at least has that.

20 AP, class level 12: Aura of Menace: Toggle: You project a 15 meter Aura of Menace, decreasing the saving throws, attack, and armor class of nearby enemies by 2. Passive: Your Eldritch Aura now affects enemies every 3 seconds. Passive: You gain proficiency with all Martial weapons.
Good as is, though not great. Add +X% eldritch blast/aura damage.

30 AP, class level 18: Spirit Armor: When your Eldritch Aura is active, each time you are hit by an attack, you gain a stack of Spirit Armor. (Spirit Armor: +1 stacking PRR and MRR. Stacks up to 20 times.) Passive: Your Eldritch Aura now affects enemies every 2 seconds.
No one likes being hit. This is not a good mechanic, and it never will be.

Suggestion1: make spirit armor add something like "greater nimbleness" to any armor you equip. You get more damage mitigation via allowing more dodge than thinking you can get hit three times in a row on Epic Elite with a standard warlock build. You cannot.

Suggestion2: make spirit armor a radiance guard. Not only would that fit in thematically, but it would provide a tiny amount of damage to attackers while blinding them and defending the warlock from spiky 200-800 damage hits on EE.

Suggestion3: any mechanic you can think of that doesn't rely on being hit to mitigate damage.

Add +X% eldritch blast/aura damage.

41 AP, class level 20: Celestial Spirit: +2 CON, +2 CHA.Toggle: When enabled, you float above the ground, gain Feather Falling, and are immune to knockdown effects. When enabled, your Eldritch Blasts gain 3d6 Light damage, and you gain 10 Melee Power, Ranged Power, and Universal Spell Power.
This is good, but for scaling purposes, I'd rather you just get another X% damage to Eldritch Blast/Aura.

We all know that damage dice just don't hold up, so don't design this as unscalable.

Note: I absolutely love the flavor of this capstone. I will absolutely make a capstone Enlightened Spirit just for this, regardless of how disappointed I am with their DPS and survivability in their current incarnation.

SUMMONING
Since we all know the dev team doesn't have the resources to do things like pair a summoning pass with the warlock update, or create new warlock spells, etc, at least make the summoning enhancements give a small personal bonus. That way, there's a reason to take them.

As it stands, most players are *making themselves weaker* by buffing creatures that essentially die instantly in epic hard, or at best, survive long enough to distract monsters and anger other party members with their terrible AI.

Please don't get me started on hirelings, as their AI is completely unforgivable lately. Believe me, I wish summoning were a viable mechanic in DDO as I love summoning-based characters in all games. Sadly, it's not even remotely viable in its current state.

Tier Three
Fortify Summons: Your summoned creatures, hirelings, and pets get +25/50/100% fortification, 5/10/15 PRR, and 5/10/15 MRR.
CON/CHA
Change name to "Eldritch Fortification" with same or slightly reduced benefit to summons, but +3/6/10 PRR/MRR to warlock personally.

Tier Four
Imbue Summons: Your summoned creatures/hirelings/pets gain 10/20/30 Melee, Ranged, and Universal Spell Power
CON/CHA
Change name to "Eldritch Imbuement" with same or slightly reduced benefit to summons, but +2/5/8 to warlock's personal melee/ranged/universal spell power.

Tier Five
Displace Summons: Your summoned creatures/hirelings/pets gain a permanent 25% Concealment, as per the item effect "Lesser Displacement", and 10% Dodge.
Displacement SLA: The caster's appearance becomes extremely blurred, giving enemies a 50% miss chance when attacking. (Cooldown: 3 seconds. Activation Cost: 6 SP)
Conflate these two enhancements (Displace Summons is a waste of space.)

Change name to "Eldritch Displacement" or "Bend the Light" and make it *permanent* 25% concealment to both warlock and summons, with summons getting the added benefit of 10% dodge.

Warpriests get perma-blur so the coding exists, and not having to cast the SLA is a nice quality of life enhancement for warlocks.

In place of "Displace Summons," add a static enhancement called "Enlighten Companions" to summons that gives them something like Pale Master's "dark furor" (Your Skeletal Knight gains 15%/30%/45% Doublestrike, and its attacks bypass 5%/10%/15% of enemy Fortification.)

Summons have **** DPS so, if we're truly interested in them being good for anything, they need a ton of doublestrike and fort bypass at a minimum.

RADIANT BURST CLONE
Break Forth: Calling upon your patron, you convert the space around you into positive energy, healing 1d8 plus 1 per Warlock level to all nearby allies, remove 1d4 negative levels and 1d6 points of ability damage. Undead take 1d8 Positive damage per Warlock level (Will save for half). (Metamagic: Empower, Empower Heal, Maximize, Quicken. Spell Resistance: Yes)
This enhancement is kind of sad. I'm happy it at least has a different name.

Could you at least make it also do Eldritch Aura damage when you do it?

Enlightened Spirits need all the DPS they can get.

I'll play Enlightened Spirits just because I have a light-themed melee character, and it's a great flavor fit.

However, I think it's currently a shame that Warlocks, who, as others have pointed out, are in many ways monotonously similar to other classes. Then, you get to their melee tree, and it's literally copy+pasted out of other classes' signature abilities, with some added "buffs" to a mechanic in DDO--summoning--that most regard as (at best) useless to (at worst) detrimental to gameplay.

And again, I thought Tainted Scholar and Souleater were actually quite good, bordering on the eye-popping power that is the swash/holy sword/blood strength/storm's eye era of buffs. (Note I didn't mention rogues because their pass did not promote them to the caliber of the above enhancements).

Thank you for the new class, devs! Looking forward to launch.

[Drakos]

Ok, I have a few points, some I haven't seen posted yet, others I will list to add my voice in agreement:

1) The Eldritch Chain seems really powerful at low levels and under powered at the upper levels.

2) The constant need to change out of Eldritch Chain just to break barrels and doors is a pain in the... well you get the idea. This is especially an issue with the fact that the reactivation time is too long. It does make yo not worry in quests where you are not supposed to break things, like the solo spiders quest.

3) There seems to be a problem, either with certain armors or with the no ASF in Light armor code, because I was getting 15% ASF in light armor for my spells.

4) I have noticed that sometimes when I turn off the Eldritch cChain, top break barrels or some such, my movement is slowed. Toggling the basis EB on then off fixes the issue.

5) The animation for running, when in a common area with the EB toggled on is broken, it looks like your gliding over the ground.

6) The Eldritch Chain distance between targets seems to be too far.

That will be enough for now.

[Drakos]

Tainted Scholar and Souleater are both powerful and flavorful. Not much to say there, I think they are well-done. I agree with others that there could be more flavor in terms of (at least) renaming spells, figuring out a way to completely do away with spell points as a warlock mechanic, and other general concerns, but that's not what I want to address in this post.
How did you test Souleater? It haven been released on Lama yet/

[mezzorco]

Talking about which feats are of any use to a warlock: did someone try whether Resilience feat increases EB cooldown or not?

[Drathsiddh]

Firstly, the Sonic EB from Fey looks UGLY! Haven't played demon yet but the Great Old One is cool. Also, when you are using a staff or any weapon, the EB animation is the same. And by that I mean, The casting animation. He still does the same ju-ditsu chops. I was really hoping that EB would go from the tip of you sword while you swung it around but disappointed to see that its still the same. I'll assume that this is a bug and is not WAI. Make the first attack faster and there seem only to be three EBs in an attack sequence. I was under the impression that it would scale with BAB or something.

Then I still am affected by ASF while wearing light armour.

The spell components are the same as Sorc/Wis? I'll take that as temporary.

What feats am I supposed to take? No idea whatsoever.

[Requiro]

How did you test Souleater? It haven been released on Lama yet/

Maybe he is from the future? :D

And to be serious: I guess that he did not test anything on Lamannia. He just pretend to write some theoretical opinion.

[Xoham]

Invocations are by far the most important issue regarding warlocks. I think warlocks should have unlimited casting of invocations, and that their invocations should be less powerful than high level wizard and sorcerer spells. Adventuring without the need to rest for invocations is what makes a warlock fun and unique. Using spell points to cast Mass Hold Monster + Energy Burst, or Wail of the Banshee, is not unique.

In fact, the proposed warlock is potentially even better than a sorcerer at that non-warlock playstyle! Currently, a warlock's Mass Hold Monster and Wail of the Banshee can be cast 2 DC higher than a sorcerer's (or 4 DC higher when using a temporary boost), despite only having a base spell level of 6. Specifically: both classes can take the same feats and the same Charisma enhancements; a warlock starts with 3 DC less (base level 6 vs base level 9); but a warlock can gain an extra +5 DC from enhancements over a sorcerer (+3 DC from tier 5 tainted scholar, +1 DC from tier 4 souleater, and an extra +1 DC from the tainted scholar capstone compared to a savant capstone), for a net total of +2 DC (or +4 DC when using the tainted scholar's temporary boost). In addition, a warlock can cast Mass Hold Monster or Wail of the Banshee at level 16, while a sorcerer cannot cast either until level 18.

I think it is inappropriate to add level 8 and 9 wizard and sorcerer spells to the warlock; casting those should be the ultimate ability defining high level wizard and sorcerers (who otherwise have only a d4 hit dice, no armour, and minimal weaponry). Though not perfect analogies, I think it is similar to not giving paladins level 8 and 9 cleric spells, not giving rangers level 8 and 9 druid spells, not giving artificers level 8 and 9 spells of any sort, and, though with very specific exceptions, not giving bards level 8 and 9 wizard and sorcerer spells. Like all of these classes, warlocks already have something else: in warlock's case, it is not naturally high melee ability, archer ability, or music, but eldritch blasts.

I have already posted several other posts of feedback about this issue in the "Warlocks!" thread at https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460051-Warlocks!, so I will end this post here.

Thank you for listening and I hope you are still considering changes!

[Xoham]

Although I think invocations are the most important issue, I wanted to give some feedback on other aspects of warlocks. Currently, I think fey pact warlocks are a tiny bit too powerful. A disclaimer: this is not based on first-hand Lammania experience.

Alignment/multi-classing



Fey
Fiend
Great Old One


Any
No Paladin
No Paladin
No Monk



The major effect of alignment is to limit multi-classing potential. As both paladin and monk are quite commonly used in multi-classes, there is a relatively clear order of power in this respect. This is not a very significant criteria for me.

Fey > Fiend > Great Old One

Eldritch blast



Fey
Fiend
Great Old One


Sonic, reflex save
Fire, fortitude save
Acid, will save



Element

There are three criteria on which I would assess element: resistance, spell power, and (apologies) synergy:
Resistance: sonic is one of the least resisted damage types in the game, acid is uncommonly resisted but monsters are rarely immune, and fire is probably the most common immunity in the game, particularly in Shavarath.
Spell power: I think all three are roughly equivalent; sonic could perhaps obtain a slight advantage at the very high levels due to its relevant skill, perform, benefitting from charisma rather than spellcraft's intelligence (a non-class-skill perform rank of 11 will equal a class-skill spellcraft rank of 23 for a character whose charisma bonus is 12 better than their intelligence bonus).
Synergy: fire has the most potential from multi-classing, and particularly epic destiny usage, then acid and sonic, acid particularly with Draconic Incarnation, and sonic particularly with Shiradi Champion.

Fey > Great Old One ~ Fiend

Saving throw type

In terms of saving throw type, I think there is a slightly less clear power order:
Will: least likely to be a high save for monsters, unable to be evaded.
Fortitude: typically the highest save for monsters, and against many monsters half-damage is incredibly likely, unable to be evaded.
Reflex: typically the second highest for monsters, though reflex-based spell effects can be evaded, and many monsters have evasion.
Will-based is the most powerful. The power level of fortitude vs reflex depends highly on the particular adventure, and whether the boss or weaker monsters are more of an issue.

Great Old One > Fiend > Fey

Overall

Overall, I would say great old one pact has the most powerful eldritch blast. The remaining two largely depend on the prevalence of evasion vs fire immunity in the most frequently run adventures.

Great Old One > Fey ~ Fiend

Saving throw bonus



Fey
Fiend
Great Old One


Reflex save
Fortitude save
Will save



The most common and sought after high save in the game is reflex. This is because most powerful fortitude-save effects are countered by the item effect deathblock, poisons offer a time window to heal, and many powerful will-save effects are countered by the spell effect freedom of movement. There are also various racial / "in-form" abilities which provide immunities to many fortitude-save and will-save effects. Conversely, reflex-save spell effects are extremely common, and the number of characters that multi-class to obtain evasion is testament to this.

Fey > Great Old One > Fiend

Minor special ability



Fey
Fiend
Great Old One


Dark Delirium (Daze monster, % chance damage breaks)
Dark One's Luck (+2 to each Saving Throw)
Entropic Ward (+5 MRR, 25 Fortification)



I haven't had a chance to play with these on Lammania, and I feel to compare Dark Delirium fairly would require it. I will thus withhold judgement.

Fey ~ Fiend ~ Great Old One

Major special ability



Fey
Fiend
Great Old One


Misty Escape (Ethereal Abundant-Step)
Hurl Through Hell (Single Target EiN)
Create Thrall (Charm Monster variant)



There is a very clear power order here:
Abundant Step is one of the most powerful abilities in the game, and is especially powerful in very tough situations, such as boss fights. For a recent example I found on the Achievements board, see https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460604-EE-Mark-of-Death-2-man (incidentally, giving warlock high level wizard and sorcerer spells, and a higher DC with them, would make that sorcerer even more powerful as a warlock). Making the Abundant Step ability also be ethereal, would only add to its power in difficult situations. Also worth mentioning, is that Abundant Step "breaks" certain older quests, such as The Vault of Night (where moving from low to high in the North becomes possible) and The Titan Awakes (where the tiles and levers puzzle can be skipped). And, though not "breaking", it makes other quests far easier, such as Temple of the Deathwyrm (the most difficult parts of the jumping puzzle can be skipped), and Ascension Chamber (where the tiles puzzle becomes less dangerous). Air savant is the most common savant for the reason of Abundant Step (Wind Dance), and even taking tier 5 air savant when focussing on another element is not uncommon, solely for this ability. Similarly, Cannith Boots of Propulsion are very commonly sought after and carried. Exalted Angel is also not uncommonly used for the Abundant Step offering.
Hurl Through Hell does not work on bosses, and may not be relevant at all in a boss fight, though is a powerful single-target "insta-kill".
Create Thrall does not work on bosses, may not be relevant at all in a boss fight, and is a single-target "charm" which is quite often not liked by some party members.

Fey > Fiend > Great Old One

Invocations



Fey
Fiend
Great Old One


Obscuring Mist
Blindness
Slow
Greater Dispel Magic
Otto's Sphere of Dancing
Otto's Irresistible Dance
Command
Rage
Fire Shield
Binding Chain
Power Word: Blind
Howl of Terror

Entangle
Knock
Phantasmal Killer
Dominate Person
Mass Suggestion
Power Word: Kill



I feel strongly that the invocations system needs to change, and will withhold judgement as a result.

Fey ~ Fiend ~ Great Old One

Overall

Fey is the clear strongest overall, the other two pacts are much closer.

Fey > Great Old One > Fiend

Recommendation

I think that the biggest imbalance between the pacts would be corrected by making the following changes:
Move the Abundant Step ability "Misty Escape" out of the Fey pact and make it a generally granted level 15 warlock feat. I think the inclusion of an Abundant step ability is a good interpretation of the warlock's Fell Flight invocation, since introducing a real Fly is obviously not appropriate in DDO. In that spirit, I also think it makes sense to grant it to all pacts, and not make it exclusive to only one. This ability is by far the biggest balance-difference between the pacts, and this change seems like the easiest method of achieving balance.
Replace it in the Fey pact with a multiple-target daze/sleep-like effect, or a single-target hold-like effect. The Fey pact seems targeted at being the "dance/hold" pact, and the major abilities of the other pacts are of similar power, and thematically appropriate to each pact (the "evil" Fiend pact, and the "charm" Great Old One pact).

[FuryFlash]

As most people know, the enervating shadows ability is bugged, giving a neg level on every hit. However, when it is fixed, I think it might be more appropriate to move it to the Soul Eater tree and change it a little.

So, Enervating Shadows would become a Soul Eater ability; Auto-targets, moves at normal EB speed and has a 10% (maybe higher) chance at a neg level, scales with 100% spell power.

Instead, in Tainted Scholar, we would get Eldritch Spear; Ray spell range, fast moving bolt, scales with 100% spell power.

I think this sounds a lot better. When Enervating is fixed, it will be too slow. Many people do not like the slow speed at which EB moves, and would like a longer range: therefore we have Eldritch Spear. How does this sound to everyone?

[Drakos]

I think it is inappropriate to add level 8 and 9 wizard and sorcerer spells to the warlock; casting those should be the ultimate ability defining high level wizard and sorcerers (who otherwise have only a d4 hit dice, no armour, and minimal weaponry). Though not perfect analogies, I think it is similar to not giving paladins level 8 and 9 cleric spells, not giving rangers level 8 and 9 druid spells, not giving artificers level 8 and 9 spells of any sort, and, though with very specific exceptions, not giving bards level 8 and 9 wizard and sorcerer spells. Like all of these classes, warlocks already have something else: in warlock's case, it is not naturally high melee ability, archer ability, or music, but eldritch blasts.To be fair, in PnP the Dark invocations are at the same power level as level 8-9 Sorc/Wiz spells.

[Drakos]

As most people know, the enervating shadows ability is bugged, giving a neg level on every hit. However, when it is fixed, I think it might be more appropriate to move it to the Soul Eater tree and change it a little.So, Enervating Shadows would become a Soul Eater ability; Auto-targets, moves at normal EB speed and has a 10% (maybe higher) chance at a neg level, scales with 100% spell power.Instead, in Tainted Scholar, we would get Eldritch Spear; Ray spell range, fast moving bolt, scales with 100% spell power.I think this sounds a lot better. When Enervating is fixed, it will be too slow. Many people do not like the slow speed at which EB moves, and would like a longer range: therefore we have Eldritch Spear. How does this sound to everyone?Actually, since you asked, I am not a fan of this change.

[GoldyGopher]

I originally posted here (https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460765-Lamannia-Warlock-Feedback-Official-Thread?p=5620936&viewfull=1#post5620936) with my initial thoughts on Warlocks.

I fully realize that my feedback, being less than glowing of Turbine's interpretation of the Warlock Class is probably going to be meet with a hand; however I feel it has to be said I don't like it. I didn't like it when it was first described by Vargouille and I really don't like it after playing it over a weekend; I did gave it the college try. There have been several sentiments posted in this feedback that the Warlock is doom to this or that, the end of Arcane, that is not the case, It probably isn't going to bring in new players nor will it really satisfy players looking for something different. But for people who want to play a Wizard/Bard/Sorc with a free underperforming nuke for an attack I am sure they will be "jumping for joy".

If I was grading this interpretation of the Warlock in a class I taught, on an A to F scale, this is clearly C work. I feel like this is the minimum work to get by without pushing any boundaries. I know that Turbine could do better/more the question is will they or are they satisfied making a few/some/half the forumites happy.

A little detail about my play over the weekend.
I have taken Richard to level 9 as a Half-Elf Warlock before deleting the character and trying a second Warlock named Richard - a Drow Elf. Not wanting to run the Korthos Story Line a sixth time this weekend, I cheated and created Richard as a fourth level veteran. Unlike half-elf I was able to customize this character and gave a better point distribution. I am actually on my third incarnation of Richard as I wanted to try different things as he was leveling and compare them to directly to one another. My latest Warlock is also a Drow Elf Warlock, at level 7.
A poster suggested that all low level characters are boring to play and I disagree, most have unique challenges that bring enjoyment to me, the Warlock does not, its a one trick pony that is simply boring.

In my initial post I noted how boring and un-fun it was to play a warlock, and after leveling Richard up a second time to level 10 I have to say again what a boring class to play.
I realize I was playing many quests on Normal, but jeez running quests two levels above my character and losing four HP total is not a challenge. That's not to say I didn't occasionally die, situations where you basically have to stand on mobs to activate them (Think fighting Pieos Grew'el in Stormcleave Outpost, where you need to get your character to basically stand on top of the skelles to spawn them) or pests like vermin or bats that are difficult to target is really about the only time my character was put at risk. But you typically run of the mill at level (or slightly above level mob), bosses and mini bosses posed little rick to the Warlock I was playing..
Over the weekend I also helped my son level up his new character so I created a Wizard to run with him. I also played my TR Sorc. Both of those characters to me were more fun to play because there is a challenge, not a challenge of running stuff two levels over my character, but a challenge at level where you have to pay attention to what you are doing and it isn't just holding down the appropriate mouse button.

Where are the risks?
When you play a Melee style character you have risks to your character that come with rewards, I wear heavy armor and need to get attacked to attack and enemy. My casting Warlock are able to stand back at the edge of his range and nuke away. Rarely did the mobs get close enough for me to worry about getting hit yet alone for the mobs actually getting close enough to hit my character. When you play a caster your risk is running out of SP or the mobs getting to close to you; neither applied when playing the warlock. To much reward not enough risk. Kind of what people say about certain ranged builds in game.

Invocation times and damage seem to be off.
At level 10 with I felt my Eldritch Blasts were not doing enough damage and the compensation for the low damage was making them cast every second (with an occasional double cast) which seems anti-warlock to me. I would like to see the Eldritch Blasts take longer to cast and do more damage. Yes four or five blasts killed most generic at level mobs. To be honest I would love to see the animation between casts take longer with each meta-magic enhancement turned on. So if a casting takes 2 seconds, turning on enhancements, chain, unholy blast, pact:fiend each add at least a second to the casting time, please keep in mind I think the individual castings should do more damage.

I dislike the fact the character class is designed with multi-classing as a primary concern in the design. Which is clear in the design of the class as self-evident.


In the end I didn't feel I was playing a Warlock and that too me is why Turbine's interpretation of the Warlock class failed. And if I was the Executive Producer that's why I would send it back to the drawing board. There are so many ways that's the devs at Turbine could improve this class and give people more of what they are looking for it really bothers me that they didn't.

[Vargouille]

Catching up, some thoughts:

Thanks for the thoughts so far!




Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.
We'll look into the sound for Eldritch Chain and probably tone it down. We're aware of some graphical issues that are still showing up (including other players seeing different things than the Warlock).
Metamagics aren't intended to work with basic attack Eldritch Blasts, but relevant metamagics should work with most of the activated enhancements that are actually spells, so Quicken should work with enhancement versions of Conusion, Eldritch Burst, Command, Eldritch Ball, etc.
We'll probably look into how Charms work in Epic Hard and Epic Elite, but it's not clear what, if anything, will happen with that for Update 26. (Note that Epic Hard and Epic Elite only have special tricks that apply to Charms, not Crowd Control in general. Bosses have their usual wards, but that's not particular to these difficulties.)
We'll look into making sure Eldritch Blasts smash open breakables and consider the possibility of smashing doors.
We may look into not requiring spell components Warlocks, but there are some technical issues that make that somewhat complex. (We might decide to just use a single component for all spells, as well.)
We're aware that you currently have to manually drag in Class Feat options during leveling up, even when there's only one choice. This is something we'd like to fix generally (this often applies to other classes, such as Religious choices), but we may not be able to get to this in time for Update 26. There may be some individual cases where we can try to smooth it out, though that's extra time spent working around the problem instead of spending the larger amount of time to try to fix it generally... if we can.



Thanks for all the various bug reports as well.



I wondered why Turbine would choose SP for Warlocks as opposed other mechanisms and after playing for three hours I really wonder why now. The only logical reason would be for multi-classing and IMHO that should be the last reason and a very poor reason to do so. That might change is I pick up more spells, but really for the sixty or so spell points I used in each quest (out of 180 to 250) what's the point?

Given this particular anecdote here, it's not clear how Warlocks would have played differently or better without spell points. We really are paying attention to these comments, but this comment doesn't seem to suggest any advantage in practical gameplay terms for removing spell points.



About 1/4 of my Eldritch blasts against actually targets went into never-never land. No clue why, I suppose it could be hit chance but nothing in the logs and I don't see any dice rolls.
When standing toe to toe with a mob many of Eldritch blasts missed it is as if the game couldn't figure out where I was aiming. This is why I have a love hate relationship, because to toggle off the blasts beat down the mob, toggle on to target the next mob toggle off as it gets to close... You see where this is going? Now think bats.

I'm not understanding the first comment here. What do you mean they "went into never-never land"? They didn't fire? They went through enemies without damaging them? They fired in the wrong direction? It's clear that something seems to have gone wrong but I'm not sure what.



- I got Reflex save with Force damage not only Sonic damage from Fey Pact.

I'd like to hear more details about this. We're pretty sure the base Force Damage has no save and haven't seen this ourselves (nor many reports of this). For instance, what enemies were you fighting, which version of Eldritch Blast was active, etc. Thanks for anyone who sees this and has more details.


Another wonder about Enlightened that I may have to test myself since it's antithetical to a lot of people's playstyle - Do you have to be swinging your weapon to get the aura pulse blasts? Or could you turtle-up with Levik's Defender and Shield Block stuff, while the mobs wail on you futilely and your aura tears them down?

You don't have to attack to deal damage with Enlightened Spirit's aura.


"Binding Chain" and "Howl of Terror" are not standard spells. Since they're not on any spell list, I can't tell what spell level they are.
Binding Chain is level 4. Howl of Terror is level 6. Same as the level in the Warlock spell book, like other spell book spells, using the standard DCs for spells used by all classes.


- Eldritch blasts really need to be able to destroy breakables!

It does, though Eldritch Chain has a bug preventing that right now.



- Stanch just doesn't look like an ability I'd want to use.

We're curious as to how this played with players who actually pushed the button. It's been iterated on more than some other abilities; in local playtesting of level 28 quests, our tests showed that it was very strong.


- Entangle seems like a really strange spell for the great old one pact. Great old ones are alien horrors, not tree-hugging nature types. Any chance we could get Evard's black tentacles instead?

Maybe. But depending on when/if we get more Tentacles DDO, you should assume the vines and primal plants are coming out of the ocean when cast by Great Old Ones. :)


I find things breaking me out of blasting in an eldritch manner, like using Darkfire. I think there needs to be a clear explanation of what you can and cannot do when eldritch blasting.

I'm confused about this. Are you saying that activated Darkfire turned off your Eldritch Blast toggle? This is not intended to happen at all.


Keep existing spells code, but please for the love of god, rename them for the Warlock. Why should a Warlock have Entangle?

Tentacles strangling you from an watery grip seemed to fit Great Old One.

[Augon]

We may look into not requiring spell components Warlocks, but there are some technical issues that make that somewhat complex.



Why would you not be able to grant them the harper enhancement, Magic of Austerity?

[Mast3rR0b]

Tentacles strangling you from an watery grip seemed to fit Great Old One.

It does! But that's a "druid/ranger" spell. It -does- fit, but the feel you get from casting a druid spell as a Warlock is... underwhelming. I guess my concern about this particular thing is mostly about polishing, or the wrapping of the package.

I think you have read my other ponts too, so i'm good. (and i hope they get addressed)

[DemonMage]

Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.
Metamagics aren't intended to work with basic attack Eldritch Blasts, but relevant metamagics should work with most of the activated enhancements that are actually spells, so Quicken should work with enhancement versions of Conusion, Eldritch Burst, Command, Eldritch Ball, etc.
We'll look into making sure Eldritch Blasts smash open breakables and consider the possibility of smashing doors.
We may look into not requiring spell components Warlocks, but there are some technical issues that make that somewhat complex. (We might decide to just use a single component for all spells, as well.)


Eldritch Blast feels good. It's fairly smooth (there's slowness at the start but I imagine that's intended, it feels a bit awkward though), fires at a good clip and I don't feel my damage is particularly weak outside of maybe red named guys in EE. Which Soul Eater should help with that some. I still think it would be nice if Blast had a cooldown/counter ability to blow similar to Many Shot/Haste Boost/+crit something that would give you a button to press for More Numbers when you want to shine.

It's probably a good thing to not have a feat tax on Blast (which is largely Bad Design), but it does lead to your original problem of Warlock's not having a lot of good feat choices. Taking Max/Emp for a small handful of abilities, while viable, isn't particularly compelling. It's probably fine as is, but I feel torn on it.

It should definitely break down doors, it's super irritating when your super cool main attack is stopped by a door and then you punch it once and it explodes.

Singular spell component would be ideal if it doesn't consume too much dev time. Spell components are... not fun, but also not a particularly big deal in the end (part of why they're not fun).

[Krelar]

Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.


The basic blast *felt* slow to me. When running and firing I appeared to be outrunning the blast. (I didn't check enough to see if that was actually the case or if it was just a graphical issue)




We may look into not requiring spell components Warlocks, but there are some technical issues that make that somewhat complex. (We might decide to just use a single component for all spells, as well.)


Grant them eschew materials at level 1 for free? (Would still need special components but it would cover most cases)

[GoldyGopher]

Given this particular anecdote here, it's not clear how Warlocks would have played differently or better without spell points. We really are paying attention to these comments, but this comment doesn't seem to suggest any advantage in practical gameplay terms for removing spell points.


I'm not understanding the first comment here. What do you mean they "went into never-never land"? They didn't fire? They went through enemies without damaging them? They fired in the wrong direction? It's clear that something seems to have gone wrong but I'm not sure what.



Given these are both from me:

It is not about game play in terms of the technical aspect but rather about game play in the feel of what makes Warlocks unique. I am not sure I can explain it clearly.
On the highest level Spell Points bring nothing to Warlocks; however through the use of Multi-Classing Spell Points bring a large portion of what makes Warlocks unique to other classes for little or no cost.


Warlocks in PnP don't have casting limits, you invoke your spell (SLA) take a turn or two to prepare it and "boom" the effect goes. In several versions of D&D the amount of time it takes to invoke your spell varies and the warlock is extremely acceptable to interruption or spell failure (using to describe). In PnP Warlock invocations are not quick and usually fairly powerful and the only limit a character has in using them is the number of turns available in an encounter.
In DDO (and many other MMOs) casting limits are based upon Spell Points or Mana, not casting limits on number of spells or ..
There are two reasons to give Warlocks SP in DDO, from the player perspective it is all about multi-classing from the Developer perspective I'm fairly certain it is all about reusing code.

The Eldritch Blast is unlimited use (with a toggle) and does not effect the Spell Points. Besides my complaints about the relative strength and casting time of EB and the toggle itself that is not a part of this discussion.
Rather lets look at the Spells given to a Warlock and the need or desire to use them.

Turbine made them just plain spells as opposed to invocations. Thus they need spell points.
My three Warlocks over the weekend all ended up slightly more than double the base number of Spell Points, without any effort at all.
Now look at the Warlock Spell List?
Assume you are a pure 20 Warlock - without ay effort with standard equipment you will be what 1400 Spell Points, how are you as a Warlock going to use all those spell points. You main weapon is the Eldritch Blast doesn't use SP, you might use a couple hundred Spell Points in buffing and maybe even a few points in quest, but for the most part your pure Warlock will have difficulty using all their spell points.
Now lets say you Multi-Class 12 / 8 Warlock/Sorc See where this is going. You get 90% of the damage from you EB at no cost, plus add in one level 4 Spells and Meta Magics and so on and so forth. I'm not necessarily suggesting that's the optimum build but clear it is a break point. I read on another forum about an interesting splash of 7 Levels of Warlock with 13 Wizard making a potential interesting combination the cost of 50 to 100 spell points and adding EB at what 75% damage. Not that I ran this persons numbers but it is clear they believe its a solid build.


As for firing into never never, as they didn't go at or strike their target. Please note I am find a target, push mouse button, hold mouse button until everything is destroyed Warlock player.
When I was invoking Eldritch Blasts many of the blasts of power would travel in directions no exactly at where I was pointing. Some would take a left turn upon casting, some went straight up, some went at my feet, and yes some passed through multiple targets without going off. I tried looking at my combat log but it wasn't much help.

[SacramentoSquid]

Catching up, some thoughts:

Thanks for the thoughts so far!



[LIST]
Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.
Metamagics aren't intended to work with basic attack Eldritch Blasts, but relevant metamagics should work with most of the activated enhancements that are actually spells, so Quicken should work with enhancement versions of Conusion, Eldritch Burst, Command, Eldritch Ball, etc.


I feel like the number of shots per minute on EB is good, but the animation chain is a little rough, if possible it would be great if the start and the transition between last and first blast were smoothed out a little. Also when moving if you start your EB you slow down for a second as if casting a spell, but then you speed back up as you continue blasting, if this could be addressed that would be great.

I am somewhat mixed on metamagics, I feel like if we get them added to blasts, then the spell power component on blasts would just be lowered to compensate, which is pointless but at the same time it does feel a bit odd as a dps caster to not have max/empower. I think there are still enough good options for feats, such as spell DC and defensive feats that warlocks will not have to much trouble finding ways to spend their feat choices.

[edrein]

Catching up, some thoughts:

Thanks for the thoughts so far!

Thanks for all the various bug reports as well.



No comment about warlocks having the HP progression of a wizard right now? Not even a quick peek to make sure they are getting d6 per level instead of the d4 several people reported to me?

[nsromanzo]

So running through lamannia on a lvl 4 Warlock using Eldritch Blast Chain: Shape I feel that it is just too OP. I run into a mob and they are dead within 2 seconds. After a while it got really boring so I switched to Eldritch Blast: Focused (just the straight eldritch blast) and I found that it while it was still a little tedious it did give more a challenge and was still a very effective skill that I enjoyed using. I suggest making the Eldritch Blast Chain: Shape a lvl 12 or 18 core ability for all 3 enhancements. Keep the core enhancement the same just add Eldritch Blast Chain: Shape.

[Chazmyr]

Just from playing around on both high lvl and low lvl Warlock's the past two days, I like them. Below are a few of my initial thoughts and observations ....

- I am seeing arcane spell failure with light armor.
- The inability to break breakables, doors, etc. is a pita for players like me that smash everything they can. Most people don't even bother with breakables it seems, so probably a non issue for most.
- I would suggest toning down the eldritch blast sounds. It is quite abrasive and I can see it getting really annoying after 28 to 30 lvls of play time both for yourself and your party members. Kind of the same as how my eternal wand of cure minor wounds makes my wife curse at me every time I get it out at low lvl. LOL.

[edrein]

Just from playing around on both high lvl and low lvl Warlock's the past two days, I like them. Below are a few of my initial thoughts and observations ....

- I am seeing arcane spell failure with light armor.
- The inability to break breakables, doors, etc. is a pita for players like me that smash everything they can. Most people don't even bother with breakables it seems, so probably a non issue for most.
- I would suggest toning down the eldritch blast sounds. It is quite abrasive and I can see it getting really annoying after 28 to 30 lvls of play time both for yourself and your party members. Kind of the same as how my eternal wand of cure minor wounds makes my wife curse at me every time I get it out at low lvl. LOL.

When you say high levels do you mean epics, and if so what difficulty? They seem to do fine in heroics, even elite. But the moment you run EE at level they start to get really sluggish and lose performance fast. Unless you're running in Shiradi and even Divine Crusader for melee warlocks feelings like a grind fest just to kill a few trash mobs.

[Sierim]

I'm not understanding the first comment here. What do you mean they "went into never-never land"? They didn't fire? They went through enemies without damaging them? They fired in the wrong direction? It's clear that something seems to have gone wrong but I'm not sure what.

I've seen two things this might be referring to:

First, if you try and swap targets during a chain of blasts (the three shots), the target fails to update, and the shots either fire straight ahead or toward the previous target. This is especially noticeable when the previous target has died.

Second, it could be the weird misfire effect occasionally seen with lightning bolt when a target is extremely close. Instead of firing at the target, the shot flies out behind the caster at about a 60 degree angle from the ground. I only saw this happen once with Eldritch blast (Eldritch Chain, specifically), and that was when firing point blank at a kobold.

[Chazmyr]

When you say high levels do you mean epics, and if so what difficulty? They seem to do fine in heroics, even elite. But the moment you run EE at level they start to get really sluggish and lose performance fast. Unless you're running in Shiradi and even Divine Crusader for melee warlocks feelings like a grind fest just to kill a few trash mobs.

The Warlock I bumped to 28 was mostly just running around in the higher lvl explorer zones. I did pop in to Temple on epic hard and pwned everything I encountered what time I was there, including the cr 45 named rust monster. I was running in Shiradi with no twists and just enough points spent to get prism stance. It was definitely a kite fest but it worked. Granted, the neg lvl eldritch stance is seemingly bugged and giving negs every hit so that sped things up a bit. The kiting reminded me of my Arti life which I enjoyed but a lot of folks probably hate the kiting play style.

[Slasheboy]

I still keep getting the unable to decrypt and de-serialize error to get into lamannia, so all I'm left with reading all the feedback and responses, and planning out on a character builder.

I'm really glad you've decided to change the progression of the Eldritch Aura from 8-4-3-2 to something more reasonable like 5-4-3-2, though I'd recommend something more like 4-3.25-2.5-2, since the aura already progresses with EB and pact bonuses, meaning that the individual ticks are already pitiful at lower levels.

As for feats and epic level support, the only thing I can think of would be creating custom feats for warlocks, considering that the 3.5e warlock was released as part of a splat book rather than as a core class in PHB, hence the lack of naive feat support.
Looking at 4e (5e can't really be referenced here since feats are optional in 5e, as well as poor feat support in general), you can try stuff like feats that affect pact bonuses, boosting them or "dipping" for other pact benefits, flavor related pact feats like 5 stacking pact element resistance + 5 pact element spellpower (boosting only pact damage, not main EB damage) +1% pact element critical chance.
While still in pacts, we could try feats like adding even more additional spells based on pacts, decreasing pact ability cooldowns, or just cool feats that are related only by flavour to pacts.

Outside of pacts, we could see feats that add extra EB dice, or increase EB spellpower (110% affected by SP), or an EB ability that gives double EB damage for 6 seconds (basically endless fusilade for EB), or even feats that grant 1 or 2 temp SP (stacking to max temp SP equal to warlock level) per EB fired, or feat guards. We could even give a nod to hellfire warlocks by making a feat toggle that sacrifices 4hp to add warlock level/2 hellfire damage every EB fired. We could even add +cha damage mod to EB damage, just like in 5e (which should be an invocation, actually)

I really hope Warlocks do well, and do hope that you change your mind about the SP based casting up to lvl 6, since, if you're looking for yet another way to code invocations, you could code them as spells with zero SP cost and a super low cooldown, while making feat-like invocations akin to innate skills like druids or equipment enchantments like artificers.

Thanks for keeping up this more open door communications with the players, even though you might hear unpleasant complaints from us.

[Vargouille]

Why would you not be able to grant them the harper enhancement, Magic of Austerity?
Because that applies to all spells. We don't want a situation where one or a few WLK levels makes your 16 level Sorcerer have free spells.


No comment about warlocks having the HP progression of a wizard right now? Not even a quick peek to make sure they are getting d6 per level instead of the d4 several people reported to me?
Like many, many of the bugs reported in this thread, we'll look into it, and won't have time to personally reply to all of them directly here in this forum.

[Requiro]

(...)

I'd like to hear more details about this. We're pretty sure the base Force Damage has no save and haven't seen this ourselves (nor many reports of this). For instance, what enemies were you fighting, which version of Eldritch Blast was active, etc. Thanks for anyone who sees this and has more details. (...)

I was curious too, that no one else see this bug. So I try replicate this effect.

So…
I went to my 4 level toon, and no luck. No Force reflex save.
Then I made new one, and in Khortos (when I remember see this), on level 1 I can replicate this. Hurra! Reflex save on Force damage, when You turn on Pact damage. There is also Reflex save on sonic damage.

But I was still curious why on level 4 I can't replicate this.
So I went to Dojo, and level up. Then in Harbor Quest – again no Force Reflex save.

First tough - Khortos - this is a problem. But on Island I can't also replicate this bug.

Then I guess that the problem is ONLY on level 1 Warlock level.

So I create another toon, but this time I level up only 1 level in Warlock, rest in Barbarian.
And BANG - again Reflex save on Force damage.

So the problem in on first level of Warlock.
I guess that this special feat on first level (Pacts) create this bug.

One final screenshoot.
http://i59.tinypic.com/169jcrq.jpg

[losian2]

Catching up, some thoughts:

Thanks for the thoughts so far!




Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.
...



I did a bit of limited testing over the weekend, since having an install that wouldn't really launch made it hard to test at all, but!

I will say that, unfortunately, the blasts "felt" a bit weird. I popped to level 4 and jumped in the waterworks.. Whether using aura or direct or chain blasts, I was flooring everything with definite ease, surely as easily as anyone swinging weapons around wildly at that same level/area.

The biggest thing, though, is the animation/timing definitely felt weird. I got a pause on the initial start of attacks as if casting, i.e. a visual and speed slow down that stuttered my movement, and the animations of the bolts being thrown and such felt a little choppy, as did the extreeeemely slow moving pace of the orbs and such being tossed!

So.. power wise, it seems solid, animations were a bit choppy and weird feeling, projectile speed is a crawl.

[richieelias27]

Catching up, some thoughts:

Thanks for the thoughts so far!




Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.




Thanks for stopping by,

Personally I feel like, for a free ranged attack they are just about right. However, that opening animation at the beginning of the Warlock attack makes it incredibly difficult and needlessly awkward to switch in doing anything other than sling blasts (i.e., cast a spell, heal, use an item).

Also, the blasts as they are feel so very limited right now. It's quite boring to just turn it on and point at stuff while holding the attack button. If you added in some sort of swappable utility to the blast essences as they have in PnP (this essence has a blind proc, this one has a confusion proc, this one has a debuff proc, this one does extra damage, this one swaps to this element, etc) it would make the class so much more fun and active without causing any imbalance. Yes I know there is one to turn damage to evil, and one to slow. I just think it needs more than that to be considered "active".

Please consider.

[SlashbackWarrior]

1) Eldritch blast feels little to slow to me, especially at the start. It take really long time before first charge send, and then fired in pattern 2 rounds close to each other, little pause - 3 rd round, then pause again. Animation is ok.

2) AOE strikes interrupts firing pattern and cause unnecessary (in my opinion) delay in attack sequence. They also, sometimes, do not trigger after pushing button, maybe due to connection/ui lag.

3) Running speed while attacking is rather disappointing - its like perma caster slowdown, even few feats, like mobile spell casting, do not help that much. Dont think it possible to outrun mobs and keep distance while attacking them. Not that i really argue about making new pew pew but it feels that ranged options are rather weak for this caster class.

4) Additionally, due to almost mandatory double school requirement, it is hard to get reasonable casting dc, but i may be wrong on that.

Over all seems to be good addition to some melee/caster splits and overall variety, but not that much exciting on its own.

[Rhysem]

Because that applies to all spells. We don't want a situation where one or a few WLK levels makes your 16 level Sorcerer have free spells.

By 'free' you mean, "no longer has a material component you can buy with your oversupply of plat by the thousands."

They're already 'free', they're just a waste of inventory space, a minor (and ineffective) plat sink, and generally a pain in the rear for the few times you forget them.

In a pen and paper game, they're a storytelling tool. Tossed in the prison cell without your spell components -- how do you get by without them.

In DDO... annoying. Nothing more.

[Xerio]

any estimated time frame for u26 going live?

trying to decide if I have enough time to knock out another past life..

[Augon]

Because that applies to all spells. We don't want a situation where one or a few WLK levels makes your 16 level Sorcerer have free spells.

Yep, I thought of that right after typing that and leaving, thus being away from my computer, for the afternoon. Just pretend I never said anything. :)

[Seikojin]

Inline in red.


Catching up, some thoughts:

Thanks for the thoughts so far!




Any thoughts on how Eldritch Blast feels (good, bad, fast, slow, smooth, rough, strong, weak) are all helpful.
We'll look into the sound for Eldritch Chain and probably tone it down. We're aware of some graphical issues that are still showing up (including other players seeing different things than the Warlock).
Metamagics aren't intended to work with basic attack Eldritch Blasts, but relevant metamagics should work with most of the activated enhancements that are actually spells, so Quicken should work with enhancement versions of Conusion, Eldritch Burst, Command, Eldritch Ball, etc.
We'll probably look into how Charms work in Epic Hard and Epic Elite, but it's not clear what, if anything, will happen with that for Update 26. (Note that Epic Hard and Epic Elite only have special tricks that apply to Charms, not Crowd Control in general. Bosses have their usual wards, but that's not particular to these difficulties.)
We'll look into making sure Eldritch Blasts smash open breakables and consider the possibility of smashing doors.
We may look into not requiring spell components Warlocks, but there are some technical issues that make that somewhat complex. (We might decide to just use a single component for all spells, as well.)
We're aware that you currently have to manually drag in Class Feat options during leveling up, even when there's only one choice. This is something we'd like to fix generally (this often applies to other classes, such as Religious choices), but we may not be able to get to this in time for Update 26. There may be some individual cases where we can try to smooth it out, though that's extra time spent working around the problem instead of spending the larger amount of time to try to fix it generally... if we can.



Eldritch Blast: It feels ok. It is not very smooth, only fires 3 bolts per chain, so it feels really behind the times when it comes to everything else who get 5-6 hits per chain. I feel it should have a scaling chain to the BaB like other things, ending with 5-6 bolts per chain. This without adding any other changes would up the dps a bit, make it feel smoother, and align more with everything else in the game in terms of gameplay flow.
If metas won't increase things from the blasts, I would hope you could at least find a way to up the attack rate. The blasts do less damage than many other things in the game as part of a balancing act. Which I am fine with, but I think tying the speed of casting to something, like quicken, would be similar to adding the 5-6 bolts per chain. It would up the dps without the need to enhance it elsewhere, and it would synergize with many other things in the game.
I think non-lvl 9 spell casters should get a +1 to their spell dc's every 5th level. This would give them a +4 bump overall if they stayed pure, and get their dc's in alignment with all spell lvl 9 casters.
I don't mind the need for comps, considering the spells being used aren't pact related. The ones tied in with the pact in sla form should not require comps though. They could get eschew as an enhancement.
Yeah, when I saw it I was like meh, mainly because it sucks, but it allows the multi path option. Like monks too.



Thanks for all the various bug reports as well.




Given this particular anecdote here, it's not clear how Warlocks would have played differently or better without spell points. We really are paying attention to these comments, but this comment doesn't seem to suggest any advantage in practical gameplay terms for removing spell points.


As you know, I have been a strong voice to have all sla warlocks. However I understand time and development constraints that would prevent a timely release of the class. I think the mix of sla's added spells, small default spell list, and unique class abilities are a great direction if I can't have an all sla class.



I'm not understanding the first comment here. What do you mean they "went into never-never land"? They didn't fire? They went through enemies without damaging them? They fired in the wrong direction? It's clear that something seems to have gone wrong but I'm not sure what.


I have yet to see this as a problem with the game and moreso as me not thinking like a warlock when fighting. If I do not have homing blasts, they go off where I am looking. If I target something they go to it, even if I am not looking right at it. I am sure that is WAI.



I'd like to hear more details about this. We're pretty sure the base Force Damage has no save and haven't seen this ourselves (nor many reports of this). For instance, what enemies were you fighting, which version of Eldritch Blast was active, etc. Thanks for anyone who sees this and has more details.

[/color=red]
I see these from time to time, however I think they are triggers on that stack. So something that procs with the force damage portion is saved. Not the force damage itself.
[/color]

You don't have to attack to deal damage with Enlightened Spirit's aura.


Binding Chain is level 4. Howl of Terror is level 6. Same as the level in the Warlock spell book, like other spell book spells, using the standard DCs for spells used by all classes.



It does, though Eldritch Chain has a bug preventing that right now.




We're curious as to how this played with players who actually pushed the button. It's been iterated on more than some other abilities; in local playtesting of level 28 quests, our tests showed that it was very strong.



Maybe. But depending on when/if we get more Tentacles DDO, you should assume the vines and primal plants are coming out of the ocean when cast by Great Old Ones. :)



I'm confused about this. Are you saying that activated Darkfire turned off your Eldritch Blast toggle? This is not intended to happen at all.



Tentacles strangling you from an watery grip seemed to fit Great Old One.

[dlsidhe]

I'm confused about this. Are you saying that activated Darkfire turned off your Eldritch Blast toggle? This is not intended to happen at all.

Scratch that; I just tested again and found that it was the dreaded "User Error" bug - I accidentally hit Enervating Shadows twice, thus disabling EB, by getting it confused with Enervation on my hotbar. Since I'd immediately followed it with Darkfire, I misread the source of the issue.

[AMADHA]

In creation when when reading about whats important You guys say Cha is most important..
But in the stat screen above it you guys have Wis at like 16 and 8 Cha lol

I actually dont read that bottom part when looking at stuff I just glance at the top see where points need to be.

Def should fix before releasing. Any one new or someone who glance and go's like my self is gonna roll a super gimp lol

Yep, its true. I actually read all of the stuff like this.

[Slasheboy]

Thanks for finally fixing the decrypt error! Here are more impressions after playing.

EB damage at lvl 1 is pitiful. It has the same problem as low level wizards and sorcerers getting easily overwhelmed by the early enemies.
Not sure there's much to fix here, it could be by design, though I really frown on the "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" design of 3.5e.
An idea to help alleviate this would be to put lvl 1~2 hireling vendors on korthos so that the wiz/sorc/war players can get some aid in these quests, as well as put a suggestion to take master's touch so that can do something of significance.

It feels kinda strange that the EBs fire in a 3 shot chain, I'd rather they fire more consistently, but I can live with this. The charge up as I can see could be a problem, considering we need to stop to cast spells or SLAs (interrupting the chain and facing the windup animation again)

EB damage numbers is kinda odd as well, as they appear vertically (unlike weapon attack damage which appear horizontally for additional sources), but I can live with that as well.

I like that the pacts are toggles, as well as "sacrificing" was cute, though I would hope you put a suggestion to activate pacts so that newbies don't miss it.

There is a significant lack of feats to take (check out my suggestions for potential feats just a few posts ago), though I would think that there would be 3 main styles of warlocks to design for - the EB warlock, the caster warlock and the enlightened spirit warlock.

Low level Enlightened Spirit is really just a sad puppy, with being forced into melee range to do damage (while still being very squishy), with the aura being extremely infrequent and doing very poor damage.

Spells are requiring components, which seem to make no sense.



Now, moving on to vet (lvl 7) impressions,

A bug: I used Dark Fiend (fire, fort save) Pact, and had quite a few enemies "evade" a portion of damage from my EB. Interestingly, the additional pact damage from the TS tree is separate from the pact damage (meaning they can't be saved against), which is good, because I initially felt that 1d4 for 2AP was subpar, but if it can't be saved, then its almost okay.

Another bug: The T4s in Enlightened Spirits are coded as requiring 15 APs instead of 20 (as if they were racials).

Chain shot is really amazing and really fun, though I would almost say its a little overpowered, but what a freaking blast it is to see the chain fly all around the room. It is certainly the most powerful blast shape so far, being able to apply all its DPS without any "wastage" via misses or enemies moving out of range/aoe.
Potential bug: I saw chain shot chain from one enemy to another, then back to the first enemy. Not sure this is WAI but its not a big deal.

Enervating Shadow is really really slow for a blast shape, please consider speeding it up, to at least chain shot speed, or even to base EB speeds. It really needs alot of improvement to be good though, considering that its much weaker than Chain Shot despite being on a higher tier, and it does not "actively seek out enemies". Unless it allows me to EB from behind cover, or "pre-fire" EBs against enemies that haven't spawn yet, or at least shoot archers on ledges above you without fail (about a 1/3 of my attacks kept dissipating when I tried to EB them), I highly doubt I would use this EB shape, or even spend points on it. Consider giving it the Eldritch Spear bonus, making it shoot fast and far while still giving the 10% neg level chance. After all, 10% negative level chance means 90% of the time the blast shape does nothing. Even with the 100% neg level chance now, it still felt weak, as in weaker than chain shot.

Feigned health seems a little too strong. With a fresh vet character, I could cast False Life on myself over and over giving me 40 temp health for 15sp, with 22 of the temp health coming from Feigned Health, and 18 of the temp health coming from False Life, and the temp HP stacked together. I used this as my source of self-heal (which is an interesting and flavor relevant method of surviving), with Stanch as my "OH ****" button, and it was really fun, soloing Tear on Elite. Its kinda a neat way to survive, if you overextended and forgot to temp HP up, you would cut your total max HP significantly. I would recommend that you tone down Feigned Health (at 60 CHA that's 60 temp HP), though please don't change it to CHA modifier.

I almost never used the depravity based SLA because I needed to save everything for stanch, and recommend you change the progression (instead of just lowering the depravity cost, from 7->5->3, change it to something like 5->4->3 as well as changing the cooldown), as well as changing depravity gain rate to be either faster, or give chances for SLAs or EBs to gain additional depravity (like 10% chance to gain 2 instead of 1, so on and so forth), or even causing SLA casts to reset depravity gain cooldown (just gained 1 depravity, instead of waiting 5 more seconds to gain another depravity, cast an SLA to be able to gain depravity on the next EB hit).

Stunning Blast seems to cost way too much depravity for what it does as well. Consider making the top-end cost 2 Depravity instead of 3.

The strong pact chain seems a little weak for its cost as mentioned (2ap for 1d4?) but if it is unsaveable then its barely passable. I would go a little further to make strong pact damage scale by 125% Spellpower. I would also suggest that strong pact adds 1d2 EB damage if Pact is turned off, (such as facing fire loving creatures with Fiend pact), so that the players don't lose all their damage when they are facing element specific monsters (which heavily penalizes Fiends, would be okay for Old Ones, which Fey pact are g;eefully unaffected)

Is Eldritch Power (tier 5) supposed to have more ranks? Otherwise 1d6 for 2 ap at tier 5 is clearly subpar. Even so, I recommend something like 1d6+1 for 2ap with 3 ranks, considering this is the EB tree and a tier 5.

Planar Focus feels like it could us some rider effects or have more ranks. Considering Spellsinger's Prodigy added +1/+2/+2 enchantment DCs, and +1/+2/+2 to spell pen and +1/+2/+2 to concentration and perform for 1 ap each, planar focus could do alot more. That tree even added +1 DC to enchant/evocation/illusion per core as well! That being said, I would go towards +1/+2/+2 spell DCs, +1/+2/+2 spell pen, with the third rank giving +1 depravity for each spell cast, at 1 AP per rank. Its a T5 after all.

My proposed boost to Strong Pact could go into the empty T5 as well, adding 1d4 pact damage and giving all Strong Pact damage 125% spellpower.


My overall impression is that Tainted Scholar feels strong, because of the nice pseudo-self healing of feign health, as well as the awesome power of chain shot. Its pretty fun too, but fun times are usually had when you're happy pwning roomfulls of enemies. Enervating Shadow really needs some serious help.



Moving on to Enlightened Spirit,

Playing as a melee based (TWF to take advantage of retribution procs) feels really squishy, because of how we have to be in close quarters getting hit, instead of kiting, to deal our DPS.

Potential Bug: Spiritual Defence is supposed to grant +15 max health, but it only comes in if Eldritch Aura is activated, which disappears when the aura is turned off.

The whole 4th vertical row (brutal + summon chain) seems completely out of place. When placing points I never considered ever placing any points in them. Pleas reconsider the whole line, for we are too squishy to use brutal spellcasting/fighting, nor do we have good summons / pets

Resist Energies really needs to cut its spellpoint cost, as other has mentioned.

Shield is cute, but it really shouldn't cost 2 AP. Heck, you could probably push it down to T1 where brutal spellcasting is, and make it cost 1 Ap. Otherwise, make it 1 ap and give it ranks with other rider effects (not PRR though, because we already get quite abit in this tree.

Tooltip error: Spiritual Bastion rank 3 says "+1 Determination Bonus" instead of +3.

The Spiritual Bastion line appeared to be really strong at first glance, but its only okay considering its a tree we had to follow, and didn't really add all that much damage.

Eldritch Burst breaking the attack chain wasn't good, especially with that 0.8 second pause after casting, compared to less delay when I selfheal with the cure mod sla (no quicken). Eldritch Burst and Spirit Blast being able to use maximize, empower and quicken seems weird, since the design for this tree is more melee orientated, and requiring these spellcasting feats seems odd/off base. Why not make them scale with 200% spellpower instead? The Aoe and radius could be increased a tiny bit, but its fine as it is. I do wish that Eldritch Burst (and Spirit Blast) had more of an "egg shape" explosion, meaning it allows us to hit further out towards the front while still maintaining the current circular aoe. Basically, like a circlular aoe + a conical damage towards the front.

I'm glad that the Cure Moderate wounds SLA has a cd progression now, though I would recommend changing it from 5/4/3 to 4/3/2, and increase the max level from 10/10/10 to 10/15/20. The tooltip is messed up though, since it says 4 second throughout, and with manual counting it is four seconds, while we were supposed to get a decreased cooldown, meaning the cooldown progression isn't coded in yet.

I can't place my finger on it, but the Enlightened Spirit seems to be missing a little something. Perhaps we could get some cool abilities when you guys replace the summoning line?

ES also prolly needs some way to do ranged damage/ do some EB attacks while still in aura. Perhaps give use the warlocks a subfeat to simply cast one Eldritch Blast (with like a 1.5 or 2 second cd) (this is in addition to the toggles we already get) so that the Enlightened Spirits can fire off one or two EBs without needing to jump in and out of aura just to do some ranged damage while still melee fighting?

Since ES is also kinda a tank tree, could we get at Core 1 +1 max HP per point spent in this tree? This would go a long way in supporting the meleeness of the tree.

My overall impression is the ES feels... squishy and somewhat difficult to play (since 3/4 BAB makes TWF/THF/SWF/Ranged feat progression slow), partially due to the d4 bug, partially due to how bad aura is at lower levels (thanks for tweaking the progression for the next patch).



Overall though, Eldritch Blast feels fun to play. Thanks for all the hard work devs, and thanks for reading my wall of text.

[gwonbush]

There IS a hireling vendor on Korthos. The level 1 Barbarian hire is capable of pretty much soloing the whole island. As for level 1 damage of EB, I feel that a good way to help it out would be to see if they could weigh the die for only the initial 1d6. This would change your 1d6 force+1 pact to 1d3+3 force +1 pact, increasing your damage by a full third without significantly changing the amount of damage you do in higher levels.

[Slasheboy]

There is? My bad then.... I couldn't find it on ddowiki, and just hung around the island for awhile. That's what I get for doing impressions at 4am in the night.

[Chazmyr]

[QUOTE=Requiro;5623569]I was curious too, that no one else see this bug. So I try replicate this effect.

So…
I went to my 4 level toon, and no luck. No Force reflex save.
Then I made new one, and in Khortos (when I remember see this), on level 1 I can replicate this. Hurra! Reflex save on Force damage, when You turn on Pact damage. There is also Reflex save on sonic damage.

But I was still curious why on level 4 I can't replicate this.
So I went to Dojo, and level up. Then in Harbor Quest – again no Force Reflex save.

First tough - Khortos - this is a problem. But on Island I can't also replicate this bug.

Then I guess that the problem is ONLY on level 1 Warlock level.

So I create another toon, but this time I level up only 1 level in Warlock, rest in Barbarian.
And BANG - again Reflex save on Force damage.

So the problem in on first level of Warlock.
I guess that this special feat on first level (Pacts) create this bug.






I have saw some reflex saves of force damage as well. I had a lvl 8 warlock, great old one pact, running through the house D depths quests and was seeing force damage reflex saves on occasion.

[IconicHero]

so far i have tried all three forms pure warlock fey is hard with the low level of sonic spell power boast items till you get to higher level but you could find some nice random gen item i have also seen the force reflex sometime appear during random questing, i knew not to look at low levels because casters are always a hard class to solo at low levels! So i ran vale chain for heroic levels, for epic levels lod, stormhornes all were done on elite or ee! I found the damage to be ok but it seems you need to specialize in enchantments to make this a viable solo toon! This one might work well with a bard splash of 5 levels going to try it latter will update! Did the same for fiend i found this one to be easier the damage was higher and but did run into to some epic problems of fire resist or reduction so this one at time was rough but still had force damage going off! And the howl was a great choice for control those mobs that had fire resist or reduction! As for the great old one acid boast damage was limited so had to use epic ring elemental essenses on epic quests not a lot of choices for high level in loot hall where i used inferno bracers being realistic that not everyone has all the mark of death equipment yet. For vale quests used staff from gh tor!

FYI: (important base information on heroic and epic play settings)
I ran chain in all no enervate since i know it is bugged
I am a heroic completionist
i also have three total past lives wiz
i always took spell pen twice and enchantment focus once
destiny always twisted in enchantment focuse from magistar
I played all three time with stuff from loot room or eh necro pact
I was always human since i felt feat starved for bonus feat and skill points
So i alway twisted cocoon
My first twist varied for fire and acid twisted burst from draconic
For fey life of sonic i just twisted in more spell pen since i knew damage was lower
I play all three epic in shir destiny i tried magistar and draconic seeming like they would be most usedful but i hate kiting and it seemed to be a lot of kiting with them
Keep in mind i was play on ee so it wasn't instant kill with burst!
In case your wondering why i didn't try necro i did twice one in frey on in fire both times i found that my sp went so fast it wasn't really a viable option!

I always tried a dps version pure warlock in fiend to compliment divine crusader at epic levels i was pdk with bastard swords I found this to be quite enjoyable at heroic levels at epic level however even with divine crusader and aura healing and damage wasnt as good as some other builds i have made. I felt i needed to try the melee version to be fair the best part of melee version is the capstone in my opinion without scaling for the aura crusader was doing more damage then my aura fire wise!

My complaints:

The main damage needs to scale at a higher level since you don't allow maximize or empower to boast the blast it falls into the same problem as wiz and sorc with not enough damage fast enough for named bosses in epic content! I did more damage in acid and fire with burst from draconic destiny then i could every do to a boss before dying solo! For heroic levels i found it to be ok not the best but not the lease either! Something to consider might be to boast the damage with each epic level maybe 3d6 or something so it can fall more into damage of casters even higher if you want caster to be as powerful as they should be in pnp!

The enhancements it is hard to figure out what works with what! Found sometimes toggles would go off when i hit something else but would still be doing that damage like force or evil!

My biggest complaint is this seem like you didn't come up with anything original for this build the spells and sla's stolen from other class or enhancements. Even the blast itself seem like the main blast follows a repeater firing and the chain follows chain lighting! Please work on the hps you made a tree for fairly decent melee ability no base damage but from all the boasts but gave them the hps of wiz and sorc without splashing and losing the amazing capstone it would be a challenge for anyone in ee content!

Will post more as I try more multi class builds! Hope this helps sorry if i offended any of the creative team but as it stand this is not a good follow up to the work done in ToEE

[Uska]

What happend to the alignment restrictions by pact? if you cant do that then nonlawful only please

[LevelJ]

As an avid caster, I'm really liking how Warlock plays. A few observations...



I like how the Eldritch Blast Shape Chain works. Frankly, I somewhat wish chain lightning worked this well, because I can't get it to chain more than two monsters most of the time (maybe that is just because they keep evading)



Visually, it would be nice if there was a way to switch between the pact visual and the basic visual without turning off the damage. I really like what you did for the standard blast animation without a pact, and wish I could see that more often. The chain does the base animation no matter what, but I think I read that was a bug



One of the immediate play strategies I've developed with warlock is the art of switching from one shape to the next in combat. I find it a very useful option in several situations (boss fights with trash, for example). However, the chain shape has a very slow startup compared to the other shapes, and often starts by firing a single basic Eldritch blast. You are also unable to attack with anything but a melee weapon until it fully sets up. Is switching shapes quickly during a fight an intended strategy here? If it is (and I really hope it is), then it would really help if chain activated as fast as the basic Eldritch attack. If this is not an intended strategy, then the other shapes need to be slowed down. Even if it's not intended, chain may still be too slow.



Despite the above confusion, I fully understand the extended cooldown of Eldritch Aura...can't have player's working around the cooldown. However, would it be possible to lower the toggle cooldown as the Aura's cooldown gets lowered? Additionally, I noticed that while one dev said the cooldown got as low as 2 sec, the wording on the enhancement tree says 8/4/3/3.



Finally, this looks painful


https://photos-2.dropbox.com/t/2/AABobDQ7z-QkyOKZYxCnBc3f6EjqcpBvC7cwnehHWqoiCw/12/228770361/jpeg/32x32/1/_/1/2/ScreenShot00395.jpg/CLmEi20gASACIAMgBCAFIAYgBygBKAI/fPlt-Dm5yMd9mPGGkIye-ELaGfwflE9rcbg5ZSp2j6k?size=1024x768&size_mode=2

(https://www.dropbox.com/s/enfqoj1r0z0ph3c/ScreenShot00395.jpg?dl=0)
I would really appreciate it if some of the warlock's animations could be smoothed out. A few of them (especially with quarterstaves) have the weapon moving through the head at some point.



That's all I can think of for now. I'm really looking forward to playing the Warlock on live! The Devs have done a great job, even with this early a release.


-Jayron

[Iriale]

Considerations about the fey pact

I've said this in other posts, but I think I have not explained well. So I prefer to do it from the start here. Sev, I think that fey pact is a mistake. I'm not entirely satisfied with the class in general-- I believe that we don't need a third primary arcane spellcaster with the same spells than two existing classes and exactly the same niche as an existing class, the wizard, but the warlock with the other two pacts is not as intrusive. Fey pact, however…

Please, Sev, see the spells that had the warlock that I did in Lammania with the fey pact: had mass hold monster, irresistible dance, dancing otto sphere, web, blind, wail, finger of death, circle of death, blur, displacement, greater heroism, deathblock, protection from elements, energy drain and crushing despair spells as important spells (had a few more too, but less useful, as detect secret door or obscuring mist) Sev, these spells are ALL (and I repeat, ALL, no some, ALL) spells that work for a DC wizard in epics, dps spells aside (and we know that the wizard dps is slow and very spell point expensive, when the warlock dps is free)

In the past devs have eluded give the same spells to different classes. For example, divines casters and wizards are awesome instant-killers, but divines lack on enchantment spells and have a lot more buffs and healing support for the party, while wizards have less support and more battlefield control. For example, bards and wizards share a lot of enchantment spells, but not other types of spells, and their support is very different (and bigger) than the wizard one. Druids are divine casters, who share some buffs and healing with clerics/fvs, but have a lot of dps spells different and lack of (divine) mass buffs. When two classes share the same spell lists, as a legacy of pnp game, devs have given different support to different spell types--- e.g. sorcerer and wizard, who have a use very different of the same spell list.

But this is not the case of the warlock, Severlin. The warlock enhancements support the same spells that wizzies use, and with better general efficiency, because warlock trees does not favor schools, but give DC increases to all schools.

Please consider what I am saying. Do you really think that having two classes with exactly the same (working) spells is not too overlapping? Do you think that once people see how warlocks work on live, there will not be people who will feel cheated or angry when they see that the new class has the same spells, with more DC, and free dps, and additional control SLAs?

Some people pointed out to me that there are differences. But Severlin, the differences are in favor of warlock. The warlock dps is free vs expensive and low dps. The warlock has amazing SLAs that give him additional control options (stunning, confusion ...), the wizard SLAs are meh. People have pointed out that the wizard has more spell points. This is misleading, because the wizard has to spend a disproportionate amount of its blue bar in the mini-bosses and bosses. The warlock has not fewer points of spell than the wizard for purposes of CC and instant kills (his dps is free). People have told me that the wizard has more feats, but what advantage is this, if the feats don't give him more DC -the warlock has more DC!-, nor better dps, nor better mana efficiency? Today feats are not a big advantage--- the power is in enhancements and EDs. The bigger wizard's choice in spells is an illusion, when the spell list is very small and is further reduced because there are many spells that do not work in epic and because it is difficult to maintain competitive the DC in more than two schools. The reality is that the spells that I named above are the only ones used at the end, in epics.

But you could avoid this by changing the fey pact by another pact. The other pacts are not terribly intrusive --- not give the warlock all spells that work for the wizard. We have a pact fiend (evil) and an old great one pact (chaotic), why not change the fey pact, which provides much overlap of spells and is also chaotic, by a celestial pact (good)? This pact would have extra divine spells, and so the warlock would not look like such a brutal copy wizard. A celestial pact matches nicely with the Enlightened Spirit background.

Please, Severlin, consider what I am saying. Although this delays the update one week, I think worth it. I can guess that I will not be the only angry if you give us a new class that does everything my wizard does, better, and with additional perks. Give us some differentiation! The fey pact is very, very intrusive. And if you do a spell pass someday, fixing spells that do not work in heroic and / or epic, and adding more new spells (because in truth, now there are not choice-we always use the same), then add this fey pact, because if there were genuine spell choice, then it would not be so intrusive. But Sev, today wizard's spell flexibility is very misleading. There are few, very few, spells that really work in epic, and even less for a given build, as we need to focus very heavily on just two schools of magic.

I think I had not explained well before, or nobody had managed to understand me. I hope this time is clearer. And Sev, please, do not take this as criticism. I respect that you be trying to improve the game and I think your efforts are sincere. I do not agree with all the decisions that you have taken lately, and it bothers me, because I think that the general direction is not bad, but the details have often been conflicting. Many of the changes that have created lately have been good in a general sense, but with small problems that could have been avoided. So, at the risk of repeating myself, I decided to write this post. I sincerely believe that the fey pact, as is currently, is bad for the game, and you should be careful, very careful, with spells that you give to this new class don't overshadow other classes; the warlock already has his own perks, which give him identity and advantages. The class can be a good addition to the game ... if you elude conflicts with existing classes. Give exactly the same spells to two classes with the same niche is something that has never happened before... and is a bad precedent.

Change the fey pact by a celestial pact, please (or by other pact that you think better).

Another question, have you considered adding confusion to the bard and sorc /wiz spell lists? We really have few spells, and it is time to add more. You already have the code, and these spells belong to the 3.5 arcane spell lists. Expand gradually the spell lists, please.

[GoldyGopher]

Considerations about the fey pact

SNIP



Several of us feel the same frustration with Turbine's interpretation of the Warlock Class that you seem to be expressing. I personally had my attitude on the new class completely changed from "Hey! This could be cool!" to "WTW?" when it comes to Warlocks.

I doubt Turbine would ever listen to our requests for changes because in there eyes those of that are criticizing the design are calling their baby fugly, and unfortunately in this case it is.

[Iriale]

Several of us feel the same frustration with Turbine's interpretation of the Warlock Class that you seem to be expressing. I personally had my attitude on the new class completely changed from "Hey! This could be cool!" to "WTW?" when it comes to Warlocks.

I doubt Turbine would ever listen to our requests for changes because in there eyes those of that are criticizing the design are calling their baby fugly, and unfortunately in this case it is.
I do not think the problem is that they do not admit criticism. Severlin, Varg and the others have seemed me quite open to discuss with us and sometimes change their intentions by what is said in these forums. I think it's more a problem of time and resources. I think devs do not have time and/or resources to develop a truly original class :/

Well, the overall design of the class is fixed, but there is time to check what spells they give the warlock. I hope that devs think a bit about it, and do not create so much overlap. At the moment the overlap is amazing and quite frustrating.

[Vargouille]

I would really appreciate it if some of the warlock's animations could be smoothed out. A few of them (especially with quarterstaves) have the weapon moving through the head at some point.

It's our intent that when you are Eldritch Blasting that your weapons won't show up, though that's not fully implmented yet.


Considerations about the fey pact

(...)

Please, Sev, see the spells that had the warlock that I did in Lammania with the fey pact: had mass hold monster, irresistible dance, dancing otto sphere, web, blind, wail, finger of death, circle of death, blur, displacement, greater heroism, deathblock, protection from elements, energy drain and crushing despair spells as important spells (had a few more too, but less useful, as detect secret door or obscuring mist) Sev, these spells are ALL (and I repeat, ALL, no some, ALL) spells that work for a DC wizard in epics, dps spells aside (and we know that the wizard dps is slow and very spell point expensive, when the warlock dps is free)

We're quite willing to consider changes to the Warlock spell lists, or the Fey spell list in particular. We're happy to hear suggestions as to what they should get instead; it is not written in stone that the spells on Lamannia must be the spells they end up with.

However, it's relatively unlikely we'll replace Fey with another pact entirely for Update 26.



Please consider what I am saying. Do you really think that having two classes with exactly the same (working) spells is not too overlapping? Do you think that once people see how warlocks work on live, there will not be people who will feel cheated or angry when they see that the new class has the same spells, with more DC, and free dps, and additional control SLAs?

Warlocks have fewer spell options than Wizards, and fewer spells per level than Wizards. They also do not have higher DCs than Wizards, since Warlock spells only go up to level 6 while Wizards go up to level 9 (and some players have said Warlocks need more Spell DCs, though we aren't planning to add more).

That said, if you have exact and specific ideas for what spells should be removed (or added), we're happy to hear them.



But you could avoid this by changing the fey pact by another pact. The other pacts are not terribly intrusive --- not give the warlock all spells that work for the wizard. We have a pact fiend (evil) and an old great one pact (chaotic), why not change the fey pact, which provides much overlap of spells and is also chaotic, by a celestial pact (good)? This pact would have extra divine spells, and so the warlock would not look like such a brutal copy wizard. A celestial pact matches nicely with the Enlightened Spirit background.

It doesn't sound like the problems you have are inherent to the concept of Fey, but rather the six spells that the Fey Pact provides. It seems like there's not nearly enough reason here to throw out the entire Pact when a few spells could be moved around instead (which might already happen if we get the time we want for making some new spells).

There have been some other calls to remove some of the AoE or Death spells as well. Feedback from more, different players is always welcome.



Although this delays the update one week, I think worth it.

Ah, if it were only a week!



I think I had not explained well before, or nobody had managed to understand me. I hope this time is clearer. And Sev, please, do not take this as criticism. I respect that you be trying to improve the game and I think your efforts are sincere. I do not agree with all the decisions that you have taken lately, and it bothers me, because I think that the general direction is not bad, but the details have often been conflicting. Many of the changes that have created lately have been good in a general sense, but with small problems that could have been avoided. So, at the risk of repeating myself, I decided to write this post. I sincerely believe that the fey pact, as is currently, is bad for the game, and you should be careful, very careful, with spells that you give to this new class don't overshadow other classes; the warlock already has his own perks, which give him identity and advantages. The class can be a good addition to the game ... if you elude conflicts with existing classes. Give exactly the same spells to two classes with the same niche is something that has never happened before... and is a bad precedent.

Thanks for your detailed and thoughtful feedback!


Another question, have you considered adding confusion to the bard and sorc /wiz spell lists? We really have few spells, and it is time to add more. You already have the code, and these spells belong to the 3.5 arcane spell lists. Expand gradually the spell lists, please.

For all the reasons listed above, we agree that it's not best to simply share spells between many classes if we can instead use those to make the classes differentiated and unique. (That doesn't mean we'll never consider it, but it's not something we're planning to do right now.)

[Angelic-council]

There have been some other calls to remove some of the AoE or Death spells as well.

I hope you understand this Varg, but removing AoE, death spells would be a terrible idea. I'm not sure who recommended it.. However, Warlocks are very limited spell casters. They use fewer spells than other casters, and recieve poor spell penetration.. I don't think free DPS should be an excuse to this. First of all, such spells like: finger of death, wail of banshee and circle of death are based on necromacy. Meaning, they can't kill everything in the game. Having very low spell pen says a lot about caster... that they are not well prepared. Majority of warlock spell has spell pen check.. and by removing most unique instant kill spells, you are nerfing the warlocks dramatically.

[GoldyGopher]

I do not think the problem is that they do not admit criticism. Severlin, Varg and the others have seemed me quite open to discuss with us and sometimes change their intentions by what is said in these forums. I think it's more a problem of time and resources. I think devs do not have time and/or resources to develop a truly original class :/

Well, the overall design of the class is fixed, but there is time to check what spells they give the warlock. I hope that devs think a bit about it, and do not create so much overlap. At the moment the overlap is amazing and quite frustrating.

Well I believe the development staff at Turbine is more receptive to criticism than other companies and in most cases more approachable (for the lack of a better term); however I think this is one of the exceptions.

[Lycurgus]

and the one thing this game has been missing is a necromancy-focused caster.:rolleyes:

[GoldyGopher]

I hope you understand this Varg, but removing AoE, death spells would be a terrible idea. I'm not sure who recommended it.. However, Warlocks are very limited spell casters. They use fewer spells than other casters, and recieve poor spell penetration.. I don't think free DPS should be an excuse to this. First of all, such spells like: finger of death, wail of banshee and circle of death are based on necromacy. Meaning, they can't kill everything in the game. Having very low spell pen says a lot about caster... that they are not well prepared. Majority of warlock spell has spell pen check.. and by removing most unique instant kill spells, you are nerfing the warlocks dramatically.

Warlocks in PnP, as far as I know, don't have access to death spells in their invocation list. A great summary can be found here (http://chet.kindredcircle.org/pdf/DnD3.5Index-Invocations-Warlock.pdf).

[Iriale]

It's our intent that when you are Eldritch Blasting that your weapons won't show up, though that's not fully implmented yet.
Ah, nice, visually it looked a little clunky, but I imagined that the animations were not quite finished. In general looks good, are details that fail


We're quite willing to consider changes to the Warlock spell lists, or the Fey spell list in particular. We're happy to hear suggestions as to what they should get instead; it is not written in stone that the spells on Lamannia must be the spells they end up with.
I'm glad to read this.


However, it's relatively unlikely we'll replace Fey with another pact entirely for Update 26.
Why not? The animations would be the same (White color of EB fits nicely with a celestial theme, for example), and you are reusing pre-existing spells.



Warlocks have fewer spell options than Wizards, and fewer spells per level than Wizards. They also do not have higher DCs than Wizards, since Warlock spells only go up to level 6 while Wizards go up to level 9 (and some players have said Warlocks need more Spell DCs, though we aren't planning to add more).
Sev, Sev, please, read my former post. Warlocks with the fey pact don't have fewer spell options than wizards!!! The spells that had the warlock that I did in Lammania with the fey pact were: had mass hold monster, irresistible dance, dancing otto sphere, web, blind, wail, finger of death, circle of death, blur, displacement, greater heroism, deathblock, protection from elements, energy drain and crushing despair spells as important spells (had a few more too, but less useful, as detect secret door or obscuring mist) Sev, these spells are ALL (and I repeat, ALL, no some, ALL) spells that work for a DC wizard in epics, dps spells aside (and we know that the wizard dps is slow and very spell point expensive, when the warlock dps is free)

A said this before, the bigger wizard's choice in spells is an illusion, when the spell list is very small and is further reduced because there are many spells that do not work in epic and because it is difficult to maintain competitive the DC in more than two schools. The reality is that the spells that I named above are the only ones used at the end, in epics. Maybe one day will be different, but nowadays is true. You have given to a warlock with the fey fact all spells that work for a wizard. All!! Dps spells aside, but with the eldritch blast warlock has a more reliable source of dps.

Regards DC, you have given a lot of general DC in tainted scholar, and today exalted angel is a stupid boost to all cha-based casters. The warlock I did in Lamma had more DC than a wizzie. There are several warlock caster builds posted on these forums; read them, Sev: all have better DC than a wizard can reach. I think that a wizzie is only ahead on SR penetration, but the SR is so high on EE that is easier don't use spells with SR even if you have all past lives. That's the reality.


That said, if you have exact and specific ideas for what spells should be removed (or added), we're happy to hear them.
I only want the spells are not the same. Warlocks and wizards will share the same niche, but warlocks have better defences and free dps. With the same spells, wizards will be an inferior election ALWAYS. Remove CC spells as dancing ball or web. Seriously, is not enough the overlap with instantkills and mass monster hold?

For this I proposed a change to a celestial pact--- so, you could borrow some divine spells, giving something different to the class and away from the wizard. Now warlocks and wizards are too close magically (especially considering that warlock has free dps, while dps is the nemesis of the wizard) I honestly do not know what other spells you could choose for a fey pact (it's easier with celestial), I just know that give the same spells to two classes with the same niche is a mistake.



It doesn't sound like the problems you have are inherent to the concept of Fey, but rather the six spells that the Fey Pact provides. It seems like there's not nearly enough reason here to throw out the entire Pact when a few spells could be moved around instead (which might already happen if we get the time we want for making some new spells).
Yes, I don't have problems with the background of the pact, is with the overlap of spells. As I said before, in the past devs have eluded give the same spells to different classes. For example, divines casters and wizards are awesome instant-killers, but divines lack on enchantment spells and have a lot more buffs and healing support for the party, while wizards have less support and more battlefield control. For example, bards and wizards share a lot of enchantment spells, but not other types of spells, and their support is very different (and bigger) than the wizard one. Druids are divine casters, who share some buffs and healing with clerics/fvs, but have a lot of dps spells different and lack of (divine) mass buffs. When two classes share the same spell lists, as a legacy of pnp game, devs have given different support to different spell types--- e.g. sorcerer and wizard, who have a use very different of the same spell list.

With the actual spell list, I see that warlock has exactly the same role and niche than the wizard (CC / instantkill) but with free dps and other additions. It is not fair --- and adds nothing to the game. The sorcerer is DPS / CC, the druid dps / control / healing, cleric DPS /top healing and support / instantkill, etc. All other spellcasters are different in some aspects; none can usurp 100% the role of other classes. In this case, the warlock can take the role of the wizard and do it with infinite dps. It's ... very unbalanced.

If they do not share the same spells, this problem will not occur. Honestly, it's difficult to create a third arcane primary spellcaster without problems, but the warlock must lose some of their CC spells, and possibly gain some divine spells. You can not duplicate spells lists of two classes, can not sincerely.


There have been some other calls to remove some of the AoE or Death spells as well. Feedback from more, different players is always welcome.
Yes, the warlock can have these type of spells, but should not to have ALL the spells (some is fine, all is not fine). With the fey pact, he has all. The other 2 pacts are less intrusive.

Wizards primary source of power is his CC and instantkill spells, but the spells for warlock should be secondary to his eldritch blast. Primary source of power: EB. Secondary: spells. So, or doesn't have all the spells, or if he has all, spells should have a longer cooldown.



For all the reasons listed above, we agree that it's not best to simply share spells between many classes if we can instead use those to make the classes differentiated and unique. (That doesn't mean we'll never consider it, but it's not something we're planning to do right now.)
No, Sev, you're not thinking about the issue from the correct angle. You have repeatedly said that the strength of the wizard is to have more options than the warlock, thus adding another working spell (is enchantment, a school that works) would be good for this premise, not bad.

I repeat: now is an illusion that wizards have a high flexibility of choice. In epics only work the spells that I mentioned (and a warlock with the fey pact has all these spells). What else will wizzies use? Charms? They do not work in epic. Banishment / dismissal? Even if worked, is impossible to draw DC for a school that has a single offensive spell. Illusion? The same, we need to focus only on two schools... Flesh to stone? Do you know the nightmare that is reach a workable DC for MOD EE, and how few players get it? Do you know how many wizards played by less experienced players I've seen who are not able even to handle the DC on MOD EN?

And is not a problem that the bard or the sorc have access to the spell. The sorc is very limited in number of spells and the bard is good with enchantments-- should have access too.

If wizard strength is a superior choice of spells... give us more spells, then, starting for this one. Warlock strength is the eldritch blast (infinite and unique), not to have unique spells. Right?

It's time to gradually increase the spell lists, Sev. And in this case already you have the code. Use it. And someday you should review the way spells work in epic... because is really annoying when you say that there are many choices available to the wizard, when at the moment has no choices --- all players choose the same spells, the few -very few- that work in epics. Before it was not much a problem (although was a little monotonous), because there was no any class sharing exactly the same spells and the same niche, but now...

[Systern]

I've been playing on Lammania since Saturday, because I have really wanted to like warlocks and provide meaningful feedback. I hope it's not too late...

Eldritch Blast

Overall:
Speed: I grew up on SF2, and appreciate the HADOUKEN animation, but we need Ryu-hadoukens, not Ken-hadoukens. Clicking the mouse and having a 1 to 1.5 second delay before your basic attack procs is too clunky and awkward. I've gotten killed by Earth Eles chain grabbing me because I could not get an attack off before being grabbed again. Suggestion: Change the animation chain from Hadouken-pew-pew, to pew-pew-Hadouken.
Aiming: Like Sorc SLA's and some rune arms, there's no vertical aiming. Ranged Combat that you can't aim just feels weird. Suggestion: Need full aiming.
Hit Detection: I've gotten webbed, swarmed, and then watched as the default blast sailed gracefully into the wall behind the mob smashing my face. Like Rune Arms, the missile appears to be created behind the mob and has issues at point blank range.
Environment Interaction: After getting the Pact damage (I tried both a Fey and GOO), mainly looking at the Fey animation was very reminiscent of Sonic Blast, and I'd like to see the tiny AoE added/cut n pasted. It'd be very helpful when breaking barrels. It doesn't have to be as large as Sonic Blast/Fireball, but say a 1/3rd of the diameter of Sonic Blast's. I imagine the Fiend pact damage would also for as mini-fireballs. Shooting walls with the default blast doesn't "make a noise", or get nearby mobs attention. It's not like how "pulling" a mob with a thrown weapon (used to?) work. (I recall there being issues after the stealth changes that made me stop trying to get critters to search out sounds... haven't really tried recently.)


Default: Alright. The aiming and Tiny AoE would make this nice. Given the projectile speed, there should be a small degree of tracking. Especially with the lack of vertical aiming, trying to "pew pew" strafing mobs is frustrating.
Enervating Shadows: Projectile speed is too slow. Using just a 15% striding item from the Cabinet in the Dojo I've been able to out run them and see 7 on the screen at the same time. 2 complete triplets firing before they've sailed to their max range.
Aura: The radius seems a touch large.
Chain: OMG. HOLY BROKEN OP. The bounce radius seems to be the full range of an initial blast. I was in ToEE and tried to get a group down the hallway to my left, and watched it bounce over and aggro everything down the hallway to the right too. Unlike the other blasts, this one does interact with the environment and bounces off the floor or walls. Offering of Blood (L10), Cabal for One (L13), Misery's Peak (L4) were trivial - all on Elite. Run forward. Shoot walls. let it bounce and kill what's chasing you. Kobold Assault, L4, Starter Gear only: I stayed in the castle, pointed at the archway, and put the keyboard on top of the mouse button. I went to the bathroom. SUGGESTION: Cut the bounce distance by 1/2 to 2/3rds. Make it so bounces only happen off "targets" (mobs/breakables). Oh yea. Break breakables too...



Random Issues:

No Auto-attack: Since I had to target a mob to get vertical adjustments. Tab. E. "Autoattack ON" .... and nothing. Having a targetted mob/breakable and trying to "Use/Interact" also doesn't proc. (At times, if I want a sip of my drink, I grab the glass with my mouse hand and will tap my "use" key during combat to keep swinging... that doesn't work.)
Buff interaction: Decided to get a Blasting Chime. The QUAD DAMAGE buff in Cannith challenges doesn't work on eldritch blasts.
Starter Gear: Level 4 offered a staff with potency. Cool. Level 7 was all melee shock EQ. Uncool.
Stance switching: Default: 1 second activation, 2 second cool down. Good! Aura: 1 second activation, 8 second cool down. Chain: 3 second activation, 6 second cool down, BAD. Suggestion: I like the default's settings the best. Standardize on those please. (P.S. atm, it's possible to Switch to Chain, wait the one second global cooldown, and then try to turn on default before chain actually activates. Doing that causes you to permanently have the movement speed penalty while activating... Standardizing would eliminate the need to address this bug)



First Impression
I am not the zergy "Twohander and Cleave everything til level 6, even on a sorc" player. I usually play hybrid characters: Bards, Artis, Rogues, etc. I'm typically dex or int builds now-a-days. I'm used to waiting until level 3 before being able to take dex/int to damage. I'm used to slow starts....

I started a level 1 character, turned on EB and then played the grotto, hayden's rest, and storehouse secret. After doing those 3 quests in about an hour, I then deleted the character and made a vet 4 GOO. The play experience was miserable.


Build
There are no good choices.
For every other class in the game, there are "good"/"obvious" choices... a designed direction. Fighters? Power attack jumps out at you. Arties? Hey, you get these exotic feats for free... ranged feats are a "good" choice. Oh, Evocation synergizes with the rune arm and spell list... Bastard sword + SWF would be a "good" choice if not for the above issue with Rune Arms at point blank range.
Am I going to go for the 18 str? Or is a 16 good enough with a few more build points to spread around...

With the exception of Con, no choice you make during building your character has any impact on your play experience at level 1. Empower/Maximize specifically exclude EB, affect nothing in your spell list, and only work with a handful of SLAs (6 in the two trees currently on Lam, some of which are T5s and exclusive)... Okay, that's doesn't feel like a good choice.
SF: Evo only affects the pact damage of your EBs... that doesn't feel like a "good" choice either.
You're limited to Spell Level 6, so heighten doesn't feel like a "good" choice either.
Quicken/Extend are just convenience metamagics. They're nice on a few things, but really not going to impact the characters potency all that much.

This is curently a spellcaster class that is completely "Meh" about metamagics... On my 3rd time making a Warlock (the vet 7), I actually read through all the recommendations... Toughness and Empower? Okay, maybe the Toughness inclusion was a reference to the April Fool's toughness only enhancement tree. But Empower? as mentioned, it only works on the SLAs which will be free... so why not Maximize???!?... But even then, the best recommendations that can be made for a ranged spellcaster is toughness and empower?

Suggestion:

EBs need to have Max/Emp. It's their primary source of damage. It's not like they get their Cha modifier to damage like other basic attacks. This is a must.
Change the Tainted Scholar cores/T5 from +1 Spell level to +1 MCL and +5 USP. This will make Heighten a "good" choice, and still add some value to those that choose not to take it.



I've been playing a lot on Lammania for the past 4 days. Like I said, I really WANT to like Warlocks. I appreciate that you're working hard on them and you're proud of your work. I'm sorry to say though that I don't like them. They feel directionless. Every choice is "tough" or "balanced" and it's not like someone decided "This is what this class is going to do well." I wrote 2 years ago about becoming a heroic reincarnation junky because I'm not a fan of the epic game. And this class just feels like epics. Character build doesn't matter. The only thing that matters to them is itemization.

[hi_sa1nt]

Please please please don't turn this into another shiradi spammer class... I know metas don't affect the EB... but they do affect the shiradi procs...

[DemonMage]

It's our intent that when you are Eldritch Blasting that your weapons won't show up, though that's not fully implmented yet.

I'd prefer that they still show up. Especially if you mean while you have it toggled on instead of just while firing. As otherwise you're cutting out an important visual customization point. It sucks not being able to see when you get upgrades and not being able to really appreciate your glamered weapons/weapon auras would suck as well.

[decease]

It doesn't sound like the problems you have are inherent to the concept of Fey, but rather the six spells that the Fey Pact provides. It seems like there's not nearly enough reason here to throw out the entire Pact when a few spells could be moved around instead (which might already happen if we get the time we want for making some new spells).


The thing is you are doing it all wrong, warlock was not suppose to have instant kill.. or be able to dc casting. A warlock should have endless supply of spell, but their spell are not as powerful as wizard.

Warlock's invocation should be default with chance, not DC, which split into two group first we have the CC EB essence. which give a % chance on hit to proc certain effect. Then there is spell like invocation, which should also function like 20% to charm an enemy, or 20% to held an enemy in place.


Really we have enough Dc casting in DDO, and Warlock is something completely new. do we really need another sp dc caster on top of so many? nay, i say we need something different. plus this could really change the way of the gaming, open lots new doors.

p.s. current this "warlock" is rather a combination of other classes's ability. like.. displacement is great, lets give it to warlock.. banshee is great lets give it to warlock.. This might turn out to be a powerful class, but this is not warlock. DDO live till this day mostly because it is a DND game, once you kill all the DND element this game might as well die.. Also another things, pact shouldn't grant so many spell, at least not every pact, they should be more focusing on granting other ability. (starting with darken one's own luck, +2 save really?? just give us divine grace)



http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ulosnECCvmc/hqdefault.jpg

1ST pact should scale with character level not warlock level. this will make multiclass viable while helping warlock getting ready for epic.

2ND pact should give normal EB damage bonus, not specific alternative damage. Pact should act as an EB essence, when toggle it will convert all your EB damage to specific type of damage. (fey: sonic, Fiend: Fire, Great old one: Acid)

3RD Pact ability need to get addressed~~ not all pact should grant new spell, especially those useless one.

4TH regardless of which essence you use, your EB will always use force spell power and kinetic lore.








http://www.gamer-printshop.com/cbg/fey-portal-thumb.jpg
Fey: (cc focus)


Level 1 warlock bonus ability
Fey Pact: You gain 1d4 eb damage every two character level, and gain blast essence: vibrant Blast
vibrant Blast: Convert all your EB damage to Sonic damage.


Level 2 warlock bonus ability
Beguiling Defenses: You gain +1 save/character level against enchantment(+30 save against enchantment at level 30)


Level 6 warlock bonus ability
Misty Escape: Ddoor SLA


Level 12 warlock bonus ability
Dark Delirium: Mass confusion SLA: dc= 10+ character level + highest stats mod (cooldown 30 sec)


Level 16 warlock bonus ability
Fey Presence: No fail "Mass Suggestion" SLA (cooldown 5 minute)







https://36.media.tumblr.com/5ecc82d01f0baac667b5d9c062c31d4a/tumblr_morihzkeNz1rfmguzo8_400.jpg
Great Old One: (pet focus)


Level 1 warlock bonus ability
Ancient Pact: You gain 1d4 eb damage every two character level, and gain blast essence: Vitriolic Blast
Vitriolic Blast: Convert all your EB damage to acid damage


Level 2 warlock bonus ability
Thought Shield: You gain +1prr/mrr every character level(cap at 20), Also gain feat: "Force of Personality"


Level 6 warlock bonus ability
Entropic Ward: You gain 1% dodge for every 3 character level(10% dodge at 30)


Level 12 warlock bonus ability
Awakened Mind: "Dominate Person" SLA dc= 10+ character level + highest stats mod (cooldown 30 sec)


Level 16 warlock bonus ability
Create Thrall: PERMANENTLY make one none boss your willing lackey(no save), It will follow you through the entire quest but will not leave quest with you. (cool down 5 minute)







http://940ee6dce6677fa01d25-0f55c9129972ac85d6b1f4e703468e6b.r99.cf2.rackcdn.c om/products/pictures/149584.jpg
Fiend(melee focus)


Level 1 warlock bonus ability
Fiend Pact:You gain 1d4 eb damage every two character level, and gain blast essence:Brimstone Blast
Brimstone Blast: Convert all your EB damage to fire damage.


Level 2 warlock bonus ability
Dark One's Own Luck:You may now add your Cha mod to all your save(divine grace)


Level 6 warlock bonus ability
Dark One's Blessing: Whenever you kill an enemy you gain a damage shield equal to Character level + charisma score


Level 12 warlock bonus ability
Fiendish Resilience: you gain 1 Dr/silver for every two character level. (dr 15/silver at level 30), also 1 resistance to fire for every character level


Level 16 warlock bonus ability
Hurl Through Hell: you howl to paralyze all enemy around you (no save) (cooldown 5 minute)

[Bernaise]

I primarily play at Heroic levels and have been testing out the Tainted Scholar line the past few days.

Chain: As others have mentioned, it's very OP right now. If I had to run with Warlocks in group that constantly walked the halls on full-auto with no targets in sight, it would get old really-really fast. Highly suggest that you cannot cast Eldritch Blast (and Chain by extension) without having an active valid target selected. Players would have to wait until their target's dialogue is finished before pew-pewing (for instance).
Chain also has a problem in that when moving out to the next target, it doesn't care whether or not that target is unseen. Made walking through some wilderness areas super easy-peasy.

Metamagic; I completely understand why Empower/Maximize don't buff Eldritch Blast, but it would be nice to have access to Enlarge. Primarily for outdoor areas.

Breakables; A real pain in the neck. Trying to do Sharn Syndicate and having to turn off toggles and then not having enough Strength to smash doors was unfun. Fortunately I was able to get a cleric hireling to help with that. The gold seal rogue (4th lvl) had no interest in helping with the doors.

Half-Elf; During character creation I was given an option for Dragonmark of Finding. I don't think that's supposed to be an option?

Command SLA; Does anyone see a reason to ever put more than 1 point into this skill? I might be more excited if each additional point spent also reduced the cooldown by another second.

I'm still plugging along in the mid teens @Heroic and am mostly having fun. Look forward to seeing how the class evolves before going live.

[patang01]

I hope you understand this Varg, but removing AoE, death spells would be a terrible idea. I'm not sure who recommended it.. However, Warlocks are very limited spell casters. They use fewer spells than other casters, and recieve poor spell penetration.. I don't think free DPS should be an excuse to this. First of all, such spells like: finger of death, wail of banshee and circle of death are based on necromacy. Meaning, they can't kill everything in the game. Having very low spell pen says a lot about caster... that they are not well prepared. Majority of warlock spell has spell pen check.. and by removing most unique instant kill spells, you are nerfing the warlocks dramatically.

I agree, by removing that you'd end up with poor mans force based savant. I think the biggest issue right now is that Warlocks are great at killing trash mobs but lack good DPS against bosses. To me all the different pacts need a good, solid unique high DPS thing to cast. Unique to their pact. One pact can have a dot like effect, one a ray like and one a breath.

[fmalfeas]

The 'unique thing to fight bosses' gave me an idea. Maybe it could provide inspiration?

Hellfire Essence - Drawing upon the furnace of souls, you imbue your Eldritch Blast with Hellfire. The stronger the soul, the more powerfully the flame burns.
Against normal mobs, it adds a mere +1 damage per caster level.
Against Orange mobs, it adds 1d2 per caster level + charisma bonus.
Against Red mobs, it adds 1d4 per caster level + charisma bonus.
Against Purple mobs, it adds 1d3+3 per caster level + charisma bonus.

Trick of the Fey - Many Fey take great pleasure in 'taking the mighty down a peg or two'. You've drawn upon this part of their nature, and twisted it for your own power.
Only works against orange, red, or purple mobs.
Vs Orange - +5% EB crit chance.
Vs Red - +5% EB crit chance, +10% EB crit multiplier.
Vs Purple - +5% EB crit chance, +15% EB crit multiplier.

Maddened Fixation - None walk away from an encounter with the Old Ones with their minds unscarred, not even you. But you've found a way to turn your mental wounds to your advantage.
If you are hard-targetted on a single mob, and do not change target, each hit upon that target grants you +1% EB crit chance, and +2% EB crit multiplier. This may stack up to 20 times, refreshing the stack each time, and decays after 6 seconds. When the timer runs down, all stacks expire at once.

These were made with thoughts of things like Luggan the Cudgeler in mind (that massive bag of blanket immunities and HP that makes wizards weep for their spell points.)

[Harusennin]

The warlock attacks are so slow, please make it faster.
Why he doesnt have some burst damage? Create more ranged sla that do damage. Maybe something like burning hands.
I love the shield mechanic.
We only have 1 spell that do damage and the monster can easily resist. Why 2 elements? At least make something that we can change the element. Ex: Fire to negative energy.
Please make this class relevant, not a gimmick class.

[Xaleena]

Toying around with a Shadar Kai build with the Warlock class. 13 Levels Warlock, 5 Bard, 2 Rogue. So far, I am impressed with the damage output.

[HatsuharuZ]

Concerning Eldritch Chain:
If E. Chain is too powerful, then as an alternative turn it into a "Blast Shape Attack", and increase the length of the 'chain' with every few Warlock levels, which is how it is in PnP.

Concerning the spell list:
The lower 3 spell level contain a lot of offensive spells that are not really that useful, due to their poor/no scaling, amongst other things. Spell levels 4 - 6 seem to have a lot of the spells that Wizards, Sorcs and/or Bards tend to use in epics. Very useful, but I can make better use of these spells with a wizard or bard. I feel that in order for Warlocks to be competitive with the two closest classes (wizards and sorcs), they need spells that differ in some way from those of arcane classes.

So here are some suggestions for spells below. What I'm going to do is list an effect, then add bullet points which describe different ways to apply it.

1) Stat Damage Spells (CON, WIS and DEX damage preferred)
- Contagious DoT that can spread to another enemy when the initial target dies, or when another enemy comes close enough.
- Burst stat damage in an AoE
- DoT that applies random amounts of stat damage every few seconds to a single target.

2) Charm Effects
- Target gains the "Vicious" property on it's attacks while charmed, making it easier to kill when it becomes uncharmed.
- Target gains the effects of "Madstone Rage", preventing it from casting, buffing or healing.
- Target dies when the charm effect ends (as per Shadow Manipulation from the Shadowdancer ED).
- Target makes an intimidate check with a large bonus (exactly like the "Hate Magnet" effect found in Challenges).

3) Damage-over-time Spells (Note: I liked using "Creeping Cold" as a druid, since it did impressive amounts of damage over time without me having to press a button repeatedly. Very useful.)
- Contagious damage DoTs
- DoT that damages foe whenever it attacks or casts a spell. (Hellish Rebuke?)
- Stacking elemental DoTs such as "Burning".

[MrWindupBird]

Haven't read the whole thread, but found some time and did a little testing. Others here have complained about warlock being too strong in heroics: can't comment on that. My testing was done briefly at 20 and then more thoroughly at 28.

Some specific thoughts:
The first blast in the animation is far too slow. All the blasts travel much too slowly. Overall attack speed feels ok: smooth out the animation durations, or just speed up the first.

The Eldritch Aura/Spirit cleaves look and feel great. They may grow old, but for now, kudos to the art and animation people, as usual. More on gameplay of these later.

Depravity gain is too slow: it feels slower than 1 per 2 seconds. I like the system of depravity as a workaround for SLAs without spell points, but just holding down the attack button because your depravity builds too slowly to use your SLAs is very boring. If the depravity generation is low, warlocks (Tainted Scholar-focused anyway) are forced into becoming a pretty dull autoattack class. You built interesting clickies, let them be more useful. Maybe let depravity build 1/sec, and raise the SLA costs very slightly.

Love the idea of confusing blast, haven't played with it enough to get an idea for whether it's useful.

On the subject of SLAs, there seem to be problems with integrating them within attack sequences. Stunning Blast for example, will consistently fail to fire if you use it while holding down the attack button. This probably accounts for why some people are seeing no effect with the ability, while others state that it works fine. It would be best if all the SLAs worked seamlessly within the eldritch blast attack sequence rather than requiring it to be interrupted. I didn't test the other Tainted Scholar SLAs for this problem, but I bet it exists.

Big problem: both Enlightened Spirit and Tainted Scholar felt anemic at 28, for different reasons. The eldritch blast damage really does not scale well at all past 20, and there is very little ED synergy (Shiradi is ok, Crusader is fine for big mobs of trash via rapid building of Purification stacks but pretty bad on rednames). The reason for lack of scaling is that nothing other than increased spellpower benefits warlocks as they move from 20 to 28, and the increase in spellpower is frankly not very substantial. I'll quote my own post here: https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/460406-Warlock-Enhancements-Tainted-Scholar?p=5615485#post5615485

Tainted Scholar is entirely dependent on eldritch blast damage, which is exacerbated by the too-slow depravity gain: it felt like a very boring kiting class.

Enlightened Spirit feels very cool and unique, but the damage just isn't there. It's Eldritch Knight with better animations, which is a shame. At 1 tick per 2 seconds, even an aura putting out 700 damage (way higher than I managed) would be only 350 dps: it just isn't a big addition. And going at least 18 warlock for that 2sec aura leaves you without any real melee damage, but going less than 18 causes the aura to drop in usefulness even further. It's a Catch-22. Enlightened Spirit is very interesting, but really it's just a aura-buffing tree at the moment: I can't see myself playing it, despite loving the aura/spirit-cleave style: it just isn't effective at the high end.

Last point: please add some unique spells/invocations/I-dont-care-what-you-call-them for warlock. They can just be buffs, without fancy animation or targeting, but they would add a much-needed unique feel.

[GeoffWatson]

Misty Escape has a delay between when you click it and when it activates.
Not long, but long enough to be annoying.

[Blackheartox]

The thing is you are doing it all wrong, warlock was not suppose to have instant kill.. or be able to dc casting. A warlock should have endless supply of spell, but their spell are not as powerful as wizard.

Warlock's invocation should be default with chance, not DC, which split into two group first we have the CC EB essence. which give a % chance on hit to proc certain effect. Then there is spell like invocation, which should also function like 20% to charm an enemy, or 20% to held an enemy in place.


Really we have enough Dc casting in DDO, and Warlock is something completely new. do we really need another sp dc caster on top of so many? nay, i say we need something different. plus this could really change the way of the gaming, open lots new doors.

p.s. current this "warlock" is rather a combination of other classes's ability. like.. displacement is great, lets give it to warlock.. banshee is great lets give it to warlock.. This might turn out to be a powerful class, but this is not warlock. DDO live till this day mostly because it is a DND game, once you kill all the DND element this game might as well die.. Also another things, pact shouldn't grant so many spell, at least not every pact, they should be more focusing on granting other ability. (starting with darken one's own luck, +2 save really?? just give us divine grace)

Dc casting?
Sorry i cant see it.
All i see is a failshiradi class so far.

But will testmyself, finally managed to bring lama up, i doubt i can make decent dc caster from warlock, but il try

[Angelic-council]

Warlocks in PnP, as far as I know, don't have access to death spells in their invocation list. A great summary can be found here (http://chet.kindredcircle.org/pdf/DnD3.5Index-Invocations-Warlock.pdf).

I know, but this is not PnP style game. You play warlocks differently in DDO. This game is about hack and slash, everything will be moving around from 1 place to another.. Believe me, in many quests (depending on difficulty also), you will face the situation, where it requires you to perform quickly... such as when you get surrounded or chased down the by champions. I garantee you, you can not rely on Eldrtich blast 24/7... you can surely spam it like crazy, but not enought damage and time to kill most deadliest enemies.

So, warlocks do need strong support from instant kill spells. Tainted scholar is about DPS, DC casting. Why remove wail or circle of death when those are the key spells.

[Angelic-council]

The thing is you are doing it all wrong, warlock was not suppose to have instant kill.. or be able to dc casting. A warlock should have endless supply of spell, but their spell are not as powerful as wizard.

Warlock's invocation should be default with chance, not DC, which split into two group first we have the CC EB essence. which give a % chance on hit to proc certain effect. Then there is spell like invocation, which should also function like 20% to charm an enemy, or 20% to held an enemy in place.


Really we have enough Dc casting in DDO, and Warlock is something completely new. do we really need another sp dc caster on top of so many? nay, i say we need something different. plus this could really change the way of the gaming, open lots new doors.

p.s. current this "warlock" is rather a combination of other classes's ability. like.. displacement is great, lets give it to warlock.. banshee is great lets give it to warlock.. This might turn out to be a powerful class, but this is not warlock. DDO live till this day mostly because it is a DND game, once you kill all the DND element this game might as well die.. Also another things, pact shouldn't grant so many spell, at least not every pact, they should be more focusing on granting other ability. (starting with darken one's own luck, +2 save really?? just give us divine grace)

Warlocks in D&D can instant kill. They are related to dark and death. Especially Soul eating type, they can drain enemies soul and convert that to HP or simply disintegrate. Turbine made a right decition by adding instant kill and limited its use. Btw, I'm sorry, but you have most terrible idea.

[Blackheartox]

After trying out a 2nd life warlock here are couple things i noted.
Magister evocation stuff does not work at all with blasts, tho every time i fire a blast i get a stack of diadem so i assumed they count as evocation spells.
Further testing required.
Aa plife doesnt seem to affect blasts at all, is this due to the bad casting animation or it not being implemented yet or blasts counting as slas?
No idea. Fix that since its terrible without those.

I played in exalted and in shiradi, draconic makes no sense, also other destinies for a caster focused warlock.

Exalted = With aura and depravity dc booster, i am pretty sure warlock can reach high end dc for enchantment school, light damage isnt to good, with crits ion cannon does very nice damage.
On a 2nd life warlock with dojo gear doing 13-16 k ruin crits was pretty impressive to me.

Empyrian magic..
I dont get this as interaction with warlock at all.
It is powered by light/fire spells.
The on hit light doesnt proc it from any shape that is ranged.
I tried to chose the fire pact and tried to tinker with on hit light damage, but nothing worked.
Is this wai? If so i dont know why, doesnt seem to strong to me, since i bypass it with hellball anyways.
Aura shape light damage procs it.
Is it intended to give it such poor interaction with empyrian?
I pretty much had to spam hellball to keep it stacked.
I Exclusively used warlock as a "crit damage" class, since its the most interesting thing, capstone from the "melle focused" tree is terrible compared to caster one.

Couple more things, as aa and other stuff doesnt affect blasts, i also notice that circle against magic /tensors/random stances that should increase casting time (def and cexpertise) also do not affect blast casting speed either or inability to cast.
It seems like you guys coded it as some kind sla that isnt affect by anything, but at least you got the evocation part down ;) /can test via diadem

Stunning blast has a very slow casting animation, its cd is great but the animation kills the use of the ability in actual questing.
Seems to be no fail as well.
Enervating shadow seems to apply neg levels on every single blast.

Eldritch ball, what does this ability do?
Seems to me like its a long casting time for almost the same damage as regular blasts.
Increase damage or make it a 100% crit or tinker around with casting animation.

Stench is very powerful, i didnt take the heal sla and had no capability of selfhealing and i survived purely on the "hp same as char when casting on all or yourself" and stench in most ees i tested /lod, spies, bargain, some motus, wheloon and ttrap in horns.

Confusions look solid, but enemies act weird, sometimes confused mob wont attack me at all if i stand near him, sometimes they will all aggro me, and rarely they will actually fight amongst each other.
But when the third thing happens, the spell becomes rather very useful.


So far, as i assumed this looks best as some kind shiradi class focusing purely on force spell power and trying to keep empyrian powered up and hope on nice ruin/hellball crits in boss fights.
They have with high crit damage the most potent hidden potential to handle boss fights from all casters in ddo in its current shape.
In case stuff is fixed and alatricity affects blasts they will be okish for ee content


Focusing on dc casting is a entirely different beast, by going exalted to much shiradi capability is lost and its not really that efficient, tho as said ion cannon crits are very nice.

[fmalfeas]

Eldritch ball, what does this ability do?
Seems to me like its a long casting time for almost the same damage as regular blasts.
Increase damage or make it a 100% crit or tinker around with casting animation.


It's an AoE, same radius as Fireball/Delayed Blast Fireball, but unlike normal Eldritch Blast, it can be Empowered and Maximized, and I don't think it has a save on it, making it usually superior to Fireball/DBF.

[Blackheartox]

It's an AoE, same radius as Fireball/Delayed Blast Fireball, but unlike normal Eldritch Blast, it can be Empowered and Maximized, and I don't think it has a save on it, making it usually superior to Fireball/DBF.

Oh aoe?
Hmm should be able to be quickend then, the casting time is just to bad, you can fire a helball and 2-3 blasts in that time and do more damage

[GoldyGopher]

I know, but this is not PnP style game. You play warlocks differently in DDO. This game is about hack and slash, everything will be moving around from 1 place to another.. Believe me, in many quests (depending on difficulty also), you will face the situation, where it requires you to perform quickly... such as when you get surrounded or chased down the by champions. I garantee you, you can not rely on Eldrtich blast 24/7... you can surely spam it like crazy, but not enought damage and time to kill most deadliest enemies.

So, warlocks do need strong support from instant kill spells. Tainted scholar is about DPS, DC casting. Why remove wail or circle of death when those are the key spells.

I greatly disagree.

This is D&D, if you start changing things willy-nilly because of this and that and leaving the lore of PnP D&D behind the game is no longer D&D but something far less.

The Warlock class had the opportunity to be a very interesting change of pace playstyle to DDO, what you are asking is making it hybrid Wiz/Sorc that will leave both classes in the dust. That is nothing to do what a Warlock is in D&D.

[fmalfeas]

Oh aoe?
Hmm should be able to be quickend then, the casting time is just to bad, you can fire a helball and 2-3 blasts in that time and do more damage

I didn't have quicken when I was fiddling with it.

Used it in combo with Eldritch Chain with Bewildering Blast. Also sank points into ES, but not for aura stuff. For summon-buffs. With those, and Primal Avatar summon buffs, and Augment Summoning, I was able to boost a Kindred Being (from Magister) to strong enough to solo mobs in EOrchard. When the next iteration of the Lock preview comes, I'm planning to test a Kindred Being inside quests set up like that (and in an ES build meant, against DDO standard behaviors, to bolster and support a kindred being...dream reaver, I think, so the ES Break Forth and Cure Mod SLA can heal it. I'm selecting dream reaver, from Illusion, because out of the things that can be healed with positive energy, it has the best saves, resistances, and base damage per hit, while also having a useful proc in the form of Cursed Wounds, and does /not/ have any big windup abilities or other abilities that would cause it to randomly disengage the mobs, causing issues with controlling the battle.)

[Blackheartox]

I didn't have quicken when I was fiddling with it.

Used it in combo with Eldritch Chain with Bewildering Blast. Also sank points into ES, but not for aura stuff. For summon-buffs. With those, and Primal Avatar summon buffs, and Augment Summoning, I was able to boost a Kindred Being (from Magister) to strong enough to solo mobs in EOrchard. When the next iteration of the Lock preview comes, I'm planning to test a Kindred Being inside quests set up like that (and in an ES build meant, against DDO standard behaviors, to bolster and support a kindred being...dream reaver, I think, so the ES Break Forth and Cure Mod SLA can heal it. I'm selecting dream reaver, from Illusion, because out of the things that can be healed with positive energy, it has the best saves, resistances, and base damage per hit, while also having a useful proc in the form of Cursed Wounds, and does /not/ have any big windup abilities or other abilities that would cause it to randomly disengage the mobs, causing issues with controlling the battle.)

Hm you could do a summoner i guess, i havent tested since i forgot to pick augment summon, will later, if confused mobs retain the buffed up stats.
I literaly didnt pick a single summner thing, but in case mass confuse works as i think, it migh even be ok to go full time exalted with pet buffs heh

[IconicHero]

These still include the previous fyis that i am a completionist heroic and have all destinys maxed out only stat 4 tomes to all stats because of limitation of ddo store on lamania!

I tried a couple builds 5 warlock 2 rogue 13 bard this build is fun i had nice buffs gh, blue, fom, displace, haste I found i could run as swashbuckler and really boast my melee damage with warlock melee tree because you have healing you can play this with any race honestly but i choose pdk and fey pact for sonic boast since it goes well with swashbuckler enhancements and the pdk gave me cha to hit and damage also allowing me to keep perfom maxed and rogue skills maxed! So in big groups of mobs Toee for example no problem fascinating them and taking them out! After running this build as swashbuckler i reset enhancement and tried out the warchanter version and found that i like it better with perform still at a decent level and spinning ice along with all the boast to dps I could really take out the "trash" soloing elite and ee boss was still tough since they see through illusion in a lot of case blur displace but with high doge thing swash was a better there with imp uncanny dodge!

The other version i tried of 13 warlock 2 rogue 5 bard kind of a bladeforged build for early levels might get by with gold seal pots kind of a lack of healing cure mod and boast weren't enough for low level healing on elite content still nice damage did miss fom but got solid fog for a nice cc feature that helped control mobs and i did have to abandon open lock and could not maintain my perform as much as i would have liked but still pretty decent build but less damage pdk would work for swashbuckling to maintain highest cha but the lack of healing caused me to reroll him and use dex instead for higher saves!

Overall I think as a splash class with bard they work well together! My next attempts will be a paladin slash of two and rest warlock vs pure warlock both being two handed fighter that capstone for melee warlock looks mighty nice not sure the splash of paladin for saves will be worth it!

To not create another post my attempts here were ok i already have an eldrich knight paladin on live servers 5 pally 2 fighter for feats and 15 wiz for buffs that i love so the warlock paladin attempt was a fail for me less hps less prr and less damage the full warlock two hander went better with the capstone but the lack hps made ee questing impossible was good for heroic levels but still most of you damage comes from add ons!

[decease]

These still include the previous fyis that i am a completionist heroic and have all destinys maxed out only stat 4 tomes to all stats because of limitation of ddo store on lamania!

I tried a couple builds 5 warlock 2 rogue 13 bard this build is fun i had nice buffs gh, blue, fom, displace, haste I found i could run as swashbuckler and really boast my melee damage with warlock melee tree because you have healing you can play this with any race honestly but i choose pdk and fey pact for sonic boast since it goes well with swashbuckler enhancements and the pdk gave me cha to hit and damage also allowing me to keep perfom maxed and rogue skills maxed! So in big groups of mobs Toee for example no problem fascinating them and taking them out! After running this build as swashbuckler i reset enhancement and tried out the warchanter version and found that i like it better with perform still at a decent level and spinning ice along with all the boast to dps I could really take out the "trash" soloing elite and ee boss was still tough since they see through illusion in a lot of case blur displace but with high doge thing swash was a better there with imp uncanny dodge!

The other version i tried of 13 warlock 2 rogue 5 bard kind of a bladeforged build for early levels might get by with gold seal pots kind of a lack of healing cure mod and boast weren't enough for low level healing on elite content still nice damage did miss fom but got solid fog for a nice cc feature that helped control mobs and i did have to abandon open lock and could not maintain my perform as much as i would have liked but still pretty decent build but less damage pdk would work for swashbuckling to maintain highest cha but the lack of healing caused me to reroll him and use dex instead for higher saves!

Overall I think as a splash class with bard they work well together! My next attempts will be a paladin slash of two and rest warlock vs pure warlock both being two handed fighter that capstone for melee warlock looks mighty nice not sure the splash of paladin for saves will be worth it!

confusing.. could you explain how those warlock level benefit you? with 5 warlock level you get 2d4 sonic damage every 8 second... as of buff bard get all and better spell list.. in term of healing bard have access to csw.. wouldn't it be better just go 18 bard 2 rogue and drop the warlock for good?

or those tiny prr/mrr value actually wroth 5 level of your build? confusing your eb does 3d6+2d4 damage.. it seem you might have better dps with a returning throwing weapon... at least those add your cha mod to damage.

p.s. as of paladin splash for save.. darken ones own luck should convert your cha mod to save. but they refuse to work. so by the rule you shouldn't need or able to splash plaldin.. but again this we have here is not warlock.

[richieelias27]

confusing.. could you explain how those warlock level benefit you? with 5 warlock level you get 2d4 sonic damage every 8 second... as of buff bard get all and better spell list.. in term of healing bard have access to csw.. wouldn't it be better just go 18 bard 2 rogue and drop the warlock for good?

or those tiny prr/mrr value actually wroth 5 level of your build? confusing your eb does 3d6+2d4 damage.. it seem you might have better dps with a returning throwing weapon... at least those add your cha mod to damage.

p.s. as of paladin splash for save.. darken ones own luck should convert your cha mod to save. but they refuse to work. so by the rule you shouldn't need or able to splash plaldin.. but again this we have here is not warlock.

Personally I would go for warlock 6/Bard 14 for a 2 class split.

And the answer to your question in that case is: He does exactly 3d6(eldritch)+3d4(pact)+3d6(light)/4 seconds modified by spellpower MORE than he would be doing in melee if he were a pure bard (They should have the same attack speed since they are both medium BAB classes)
You can also add up to 2d6 eldritch and 4d4 pact depending on how much you invest in tainted scholar.

You seem to be making the assumption that just because the aura is on, he has to stand there doing nothing else.

Also, remember that he is passively buffing his entire team as well.

[IconicHero]

confusing.. could you explain how those warlock level benefit you? with 5 warlock level you get 2d4 sonic damage every 8 second... as of buff bard get all and better spell list.. in term of healing bard have access to csw.. wouldn't it be better just go 18 bard 2 rogue and drop the warlock for good?

or those tiny prr/mrr value actually wroth 5 level of your build? confusing your eb does 3d6+2d4 damage.. it seem you might have better dps with a returning throwing weapon... at least those add your cha mod to damage.

p.s. as of paladin splash for save.. darken ones own luck should convert your cha mod to save. but they refuse to work. so by the rule you shouldn't need or able to splash plaldin.. but again this we have here is not warlock.

didnt realize the darkone didn't realize the darkine was supposed to covert cha to saves thanks i knew fear immunity wasnt working but the paladin spash wasnt for the saves boast but the stance +6 to con and str insight to hps bonuses to ac prr and same with warlock bonuses to ac prr and mrr also adds light and force to you melee attacks yes the aura is useless but the bonus damage is nice it was the base damage that turned out to be reduced when i made that attempt!

As for the bard you gain sonic force and light to your melee attacks which on a bard who already is a swashbucker using sonic to attack the benefit is nice and compared to my level 20 pure bard swashbucker there was a boast to extra damage and base about the same do miss the doublestrike since i dont have all the epic past lives she does. Also you suggestion of two rogue 18 bard i already have that on live servers as an warchanter i am seeing where warlock could works as a multiclass like the other popular slash clashes rogue monk fighter for there benefits! As it is now i don't really see it as completing with a sorc for damage or a wiz for dcs only because of there lack of sp if they had a wiz or sorcs sp there dc can be amazing but with there low sp on par with maybe a bard or a little less i can't see them as viable dc caster even though that has been suggested!

Sorry if i cause confusion with my multi class ideas

[IconicHero]

Personally I would go for warlock 6/Bard 14 for a 2 class split.

And the answer to your question in that case is: He does exactly 3d6(eldritch)+3d4(pact)+3d6(light)/4 seconds modified by spellpower MORE than he would be doing in melee if he were a pure bard (They should have the same attack speed since they are both medium BAB classes)
You can also add up to 2d6 eldritch and 4d4 pact depending on how much you invest in tainted scholar.

You seem to be making the assumption that just because the aura is on, he has to stand there doing nothing else.

Also, remember that he is passively buffing his entire team as well.

The rogue was my continuing attempt to make a viable second soloing ee content toon i have one that can solo all quests that don't require multiple people pulling levers ect at same time excluding really high level raids can even solo ToEE. My other toon works better in that i wasn't limited by armor type can wear fp all the time and switch as needed to light armor for rogue trapping!

[Vargouille]

After trying out a 2nd life warlock here are couple things i noted.
Magister evocation stuff does not work at all with blasts, tho every time i fire a blast i get a stack of diadem so i assumed they count as evocation spells.
Further testing required.
Aa plife doesnt seem to affect blasts at all, is this due to the bad casting animation or it not being implemented yet or blasts counting as slas?
No idea. Fix that since its terrible without those.
If I'm translating what you are talking about correctly:
* Cooldown changes are most likely not going to affect Eldritch Blasts rate of fire. (Yes, this is a reversal.) I assume you meant Arcane Alacrity Past Life.
* Magister's Evocation Augmentation should be functioning with Eldritch Blast, as far as I know. Please submit a bug if that's what you were talking about and it's not the case. Otherwise, I'm not sure what's meant by "Magister evocation stuff".


Empyrian magic..
I dont get this as interaction with warlock at all.
It is powered by light/fire spells.
The on hit light doesnt proc it from any shape that is ranged.
I tried to chose the fire pact and tried to tinker with on hit light damage, but nothing worked.
Is this wai? If so i dont know why, doesnt seem to strong to me, since i bypass it with hellball anyways.
Aura shape light damage procs it.
Is it intended to give it such poor interaction with empyrian?
Because the damage types of most Eldritch Blasts are entirely mutable, they won't trigger most things looking for spells of that specific type ("Light" for instance). This is something we may look into, but it's not likely to get changed very soon.


It seems like you guys coded it as some kind sla that isnt affect by anything, but at least you got the evocation part down /can test via diadem
Specifically, it's not a light or fire or sonic or acid spell for many of the things that may trigger off those spell types. (The activated Enlightened Spirit Eldritch Blasts do trigger for Light, since they always deal some Light damage.)


Stench is very powerful, i didnt take the heal sla and had no capability of selfhealing and i survived purely on the "hp same as char when casting on all or yourself" and stench in most ees i tested /lod, spies, bargain, some motus, wheloon and ttrap in horns.
Yes, it seems like 50% health for 3% maximum is fairly powerful.


Confusions look solid, but enemies act weird, sometimes confused mob wont attack me at all if i stand near him, sometimes they will all aggro me, and rarely they will actually fight amongst each other.
But when the third thing happens, the spell becomes rather very useful.
All of these things are things that are OK, though we may try to tip the balance towards one or another if we can. They're confused, not charmed, so it's certainly still possible they will attack you (especially if you are constantly attacking them, for instance).

[GeoffWatson]

Specifically, it's not a light or fire or sonic or acid spell for many of the things that may trigger off those spell types.

Does that mean that we only need Impulse spell power, or will we need Impulse and (Resonance or Combustion or Corrosion) and Radiant spell power?

[Vargouille]

Does that mean that we only need Impulse spell power, or will we need Impulse and (Resonance or Combustion or Corrosion) and Radiant spell power?

It is expected that each damage type will be driven by its own appropriate spell power.

[Uska]

It is expected that each damage type will be driven by its own appropriate spell power.

Did you give up on the alignment restritiosn by pact? if so bad form

[Wongar]

Specifically, it's not a light or fire or sonic or acid spell for many of the things that may trigger off those spell types. (The activated Enlightened Spirit Eldritch Blasts do trigger for Light, since they always deal some Light damage.)


I'm confused on how Eldritch Blasts interaction with other things.

For example:
- Enhancements like Scourge and Just Reward from AOV: will they count if the blast is unmodified force? will they count if Fiend is taken (always fire)? WIll they count if Retribution (always light) from Enlightened Spirit is taken?

- Will crit enhancers from enhancements like AOV Smiting affect them?

- Will crit enhancers from items/weapons like Sage's Spectacles (assuming fiend) and Shadowmail affect them?

- Will things that trigger off any offefensive spell (like Interrogation from Divine Crusader) be triggered by them?

- WIll Energy Criticals past life affect crit chance?

[decease]

didnt realize the darkone didn't realize the darkine was supposed to covert cha to saves thanks i knew fear immunity wasnt working but the paladin spash wasnt for the saves boast but the stance +6 to con and str insight to hps bonuses to ac prr and same with warlock bonuses to ac prr and mrr also adds light and force to you melee attacks yes the aura is useless but the bonus damage is nice it was the base damage that turned out to be reduced when i made that attempt!

As for the bard you gain sonic force and light to your melee attacks which on a bard who already is a swashbucker using sonic to attack the benefit is nice and compared to my level 20 pure bard swashbucker there was a boast to extra damage and base about the same do miss the doublestrike since i dont have all the epic past lives she does. Also you suggestion of two rogue 18 bard i already have that on live servers as an warchanter i am seeing where warlock could works as a multiclass like the other popular slash clashes rogue monk fighter for there benefits! As it is now i don't really see it as completing with a sorc for damage or a wiz for dcs only because of there lack of sp if they had a wiz or sorcs sp there dc can be amazing but with there low sp on par with maybe a bard or a little less i can't see them as viable dc caster even though that has been suggested!

Sorry if i cause confusion with my multi class ideas

then my question is why warlock? if you want arcane spell wouldn't splash few wizard level be better? if you are looking for divine spell fvs is a decent choice~~

please correct me if am wrong... none of es enhancement seem to be giving you bonus light/sonic damage to your melee attack. unless you mean burst, if you are melee with strength(or cha to damage) you will do way more damage with cleave.. not to mentioned it scale with critical multiplier and LD~~ es tree do provide you with 30 light spell power.. but is it worth to splash 5 level for? you could splash fvs and get spell implement weapon and better spell power...

the real question is what does warlock offer for multiclass? really like to know... so far warlock seem to be an inferior choice for any build.. to heal is moderate at least, you can twist cocoon and other destiny to do better healing.. the prr/mrr can easily be find else where.. the small sp pool...not worth mentioning... or the tiny eb damage which turn out to be a joke for multiclass build




Personally I would go for warlock 6/Bard 14 for a 2 class split.

And the answer to your question in that case is: He does exactly 3d6(eldritch)+3d4(pact)+3d6(light)/4 seconds modified by spellpower MORE than he would be doing in melee if he were a pure bard (They should have the same attack speed since they are both medium BAB classes)
You can also add up to 2d6 eldritch and 4d4 pact depending on how much you invest in tainted scholar.

You seem to be making the assumption that just because the aura is on, he has to stand there doing nothing else.

Also, remember that he is passively buffing his entire team as well.

you do realize that you are spending alot of enhancement point right? wouldn't it better to focus on melee power by splash fighter/barb? or perhaps splash arty for some buff and rune arm(swf)

p.s. if you spend those point in the warchanter tree you might turn out doing more damage.. really how much damage can you do with that? lets assume your aura always do max damage(which is impossible) 3d6(eldritch)+3d4(pact)+3d6(light) will potential do 18+12+18=48 damage.. lets assume you have 400% spell power to light and sonic. you will be doing 48 extra damage per second......... really if you need 48 damage per second so badly grab arty and get flame tower, or wizard/sorc for fire wall.............they will do way more damage..

edit: on average with 400% spell power you should do about.. 3+3+3=9 (9 + 48)/2 = 28 damage. if you have 400% spell power you will do extra 28 damage per second.........question is.. if you are melee focus do you have 400% spell power? and is 28 damage per second worth those warlock level and enhancement point?? up to you XD

edit 2: almost forget we now have harper tree.. you ought to look around.. it will give you more melee power(dps) compare to that splash build..

edit3: forget to mentioned, remember the pact part of the damage.(sonic) use evocation dc(reflex save) for half damage..and deal no damage to enemy with improve evasion(should they save) other wise it is 50% damage... and you need 400% spell power in kinetic, sonic and radiance all three group to produce this 28 damage per second.

[SirValentine]

Regards DC, you have given a lot of general DC in tainted scholar, and today exalted angel is a stupid boost to all cha-based casters. The warlock I did in Lamma had more DC than a wizzie. There are several warlock caster builds posted on these forums; read them, Sev: all have better DC than a wizard can reach.

I haven't played with Warlock much yet. Is this true? Another secondary caster (only 6 spell levels) class is going to get stupidly high spell DCs, higher than the full caster classes? Wizards was already ahead of other primary casters, and Warlocks are ahead of that? So when they start balancing DCs against Warlock DCs, other classes are just screwed?

Sigh.

Making one or a few options vastly better than others doesn't promote build variety and creativity.

And it doesn't make me want to turn my DC caster into a Warlock, either; it just makes me less likely to bother playing at all.

[davmuzl]

This is based on the first warlock build that was on lamannia.
In general I tend to like it when spell casters don't spam a lot of spells but instead have very powerful spells that they then have to use wisely.
The most important part of the warlock class to me is the way they get their powers. It is through their pact and I would like to see the pact have a bigger impact than what they have so far. The most imporant thing that the pacts give are the different abilities that warlocks get at lvl 15 (?) like the instant-kill/helpless one that the infernal pact gives you.
So what would be best imo would be to have more powerful spells linked to the pact and have the other spells be weaker (that would mean that warlocks don't get spells earlier than other classes unless the spell is linked to their pact).
That way the choice would also have a bigger impact. What I would like to see would be warlocks with different pacts have different playstyles to certain degree.

[slarden]

I haven't played with Warlock much yet. Is this true? Another secondary caster (only 6 spell levels) class is going to get stupidly high spell DCs, higher than the full caster classes? Wizards was already ahead of other primary casters, and Warlocks are ahead of that? So when they start balancing DCs against Warlock DCs, other classes are just screwed?

Sigh.

Making one or a few options vastly better than others doesn't promote build variety and creativity.

And it doesn't make me want to turn my DC caster into a Warlock, either; it just makes me less likely to bother playing at all.

Warlock ultimately ends up with higher DC potential primarily because of Exalted Angel, but they are feat starved and they need evoc for their offense so fitting in another school and all the DC buffing spell focus and past life feats is problematic.

Bard beats warlock in Enchantment. Pm beats warlock in Necromancy with all the past life feats factored in. Warlock has a unique ability to get a very workable DC in evocation for eld blast and another school for support spells. IF they gave Warlock earthquake and implosion it would be an issue, but that is not the case.

The self healing is really nice.

[IconicHero]

then my question is why warlock? if you want arcane spell wouldn't splash few wizard level be better? if you are looking for divine spell fvs is a decent choice~~

please correct me if am wrong... none of es enhancement seem to be giving you bonus light/sonic damage to your melee attack. unless you mean burst, if you are melee with strength(or cha to damage) you will do way more damage with cleave.. not to mentioned it scale with critical multiplier and LD~~ es tree do provide you with 30 light spell power.. but is it worth to splash 5 level for? you could splash fvs and get spell implement weapon and better spell power...

the real question is what does warlock offer for multiclass? really like to know... so far warlock seem to be an inferior choice for any build.. to heal is moderate at least, you can twist cocoon and other destiny to do better healing.. the prr/mrr can easily be find else where.. the small sp pool...not worth mentioning... or the tiny eb damage which turn out to be a joke for multiclass build

****answer one here!***I did the tests to see viability i did not say there wasn't a better choice personally i have eldrich knight and two types of bards and other toons on live servers a couple who can solo ee content without any problems but this is a test of the warlock class not the classes on the live server if you look toward earlier post you will see were i tested the viability of a cc or necro caster! Sorry if i confused you that i thought this was the best option I play on Ghallanda personally and i can't tell you how many 1000's of different builds we have there I personally thought that frey with bard made the most sense swashbuckling since you already do boast you sonic I personally also boast fire for divine crusader do to less healing from bards in a multiclass but with lower hps and like you said less damage while it sounds good on paper it isn't as strong as other combos as you pointed out!



you do realize that you are spending alot of enhancement point right? wouldn't it better to focus on melee power by splash fighter/barb? or perhaps splash arty for some buff and rune arm(swf)

p.s. if you spend those point in the warchanter tree you might turn out doing more damage.. really how much damage can you do with that? lets assume your aura always do max damage(which is impossible) 3d6(eldritch)+3d4(pact)+3d6(light) will potential do 18+12+18=48 damage.. lets assume you have 400% spell power to light and sonic. you will be doing 48 extra damage per second......... really if you need 48 damage per second so badly grab arty and get flame tower, or wizard/sorc for fire wall.............they will do way more damage..

edit: on average with 400% spell power you should do about.. 3+3+3=9 (9 + 48)/2 = 28 damage. if you have 400% spell power you will do extra 28 damage per second.........question is.. if you are melee focus do you have 400% spell power? and is 28 damage per second worth those warlock level and enhancement point?? up to you XD

edit 2: almost forget we now have harper tree.. you ought to look around.. it will give you more melee power(dps) compare to that splash build..

edit3: forget to mentioned, remember the pact part of the damage.(sonic) use evocation dc(reflex save) for half damage..and deal no damage to enemy with improve evasion(should they save) other wise it is 50% damage... and you need 400% spell power in kinetic, sonic and radiance all three group to produce this 28 damage per second.

****You are right to some degree yes the pact damage as you said has a save and i don't expect much from the aura however you also add sonic force and light damage to you melee attacks no save which sales with spell power much the way swashbuckling sword dance and resonant arms does since i already boast those i thought fey would make the most since to try fire might also be viable for divine crusader players but as you pointed out the ap cost is massive to achieve this! So i don't disagree with you there are better options but once again this is test the Warlock class!

****Personally still looking for viable playing options hearing a lot about a summoner build i might look into after the next update to lamania when they make fixes to bugs hopeful and use some of the advice they have recieved also going to check out the preview video from friday's live stream! Would love to hear you ideas on a viable build since you don't like mine keep in mind the class your testing is Warlock!

[Gletschi]

That said, if you have exact and specific ideas for what spells should be removed (or added), we're happy to hear them.


I loved to Play Warlock in Neverwinter Nights 2 - so here some ideas what spells I would like to see:
(copied from http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Invocation )


Least Invocations:

Otherworldly Whispers - Duration: 24h, +6 bonus to Lore and Spellcraft.
See the Unseen - Duration: 24h, See Invisibility spell + Darkvision 60'.

Lesser Invocations:
Dread Seizure - Reduces speed of target by 1/2 and applies penalties to attacks on creatures.
The Dead Walk - Duration: 1 hour/caster level. As Animate Dead spell. Summons an undead follower:levels 1-6: Skeleton;levels 7-10: Zombie;Level 11+: Skeleton warrior
Voracious Dispelling - As Dispel Magic spell where if any spells are dispelled the target takes 1 point of damage/2 caster levels (capped at 10 levels). No save, but spell resistance applies.


Greater invocations:
Chilling Tentacles - Duration: 1 round/lvl, Special version of Evard's Black Tentacles with additional 2d6 cold damage each round. Damage caused by this spell breaks invisibility.
Devour Magic - A touch-range Dispel Magic spell where caster gains 2*casterLeveltemporary HP for each spell dispelled for a short time (1 minute per gained HP).
Wall of Perilous Flame - Duration: 3 rounds, a modified Wall of Flame that does 2d6 + CHA modifier fire damage/round (x2 damage to undead)(half damage is magical and can't be resisted).

Dark Invocations:
Dark Foresight - DR 10/alchemical silver for 1 round/level or until CasterLevel*10 (max 150) damage is absorbed
Retributive Invisibility - Duration: 3 rounds, Invisibility, Greater (50% conceal). Should it be dispelled,hostiles within a 'huge' blast radius will take 4d6 magic damage (Fort save for half).


Also, i would like to see some more blast shapes:
Brimstone Blast - Duration: 1 round/5 caster levels. For every round the enemy fails his Reflex save, he takes 2d6 fire damage. Once a save is made, it stops. Does not stack.
Hideous Blow - Blast shape. Melee attack channels an eldritch blast

The Chain shape could also be like this:
Eldritch Chain - Blast jumps to caster level/5 secondary targets. All secondary targets take half damage.


And as a General idea: why not give warlock some Little extras, like they did in NWN2? Link: http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Warlock For example the damage reduction line or the skill bonuses. It was always fun to play such a charcter in NWN 2 and it felt very unique compared to a Wizard for example. I would be interested in seeing more unique things in DDO also, beacause I dont like Warlock in his current shape. Thanks for reading :)

(sorry for any faults, I am not a native english Speaker)

[Lorianna]

Made two warlocks last night to test things out. Just went to 20th, no epic destinies, no epic gear. Just 20th level stuff from the Eveningstar collection merchants.

20th level pure warlock. Went out into King's Forest and started running around fighting. Mobs just melted away, and I only had to use CMW now and then to heal up (and was healing for about 160-200 per cast, for zero mana). Never had to stop. Went and found one of the dragons, melted it into goo. Barely took any damage. Felt very powerful.

16th level warlock / 4th level paladin. Same deal, headed into King's Forest and started fighting. Had to use heal a LOT more. The aura pulses WAY too slowly, and does too little damage. It was hitting mobs for 35 or so every 3 seconds, which was abysmal. Mobs took 2-3 times as long to kill with my greataxe + aura vs just pewpewing.

Haven't tried a warlock/bard yet for swashbuckling, but I'll give that a go next time I log in.

Overall, the pure caster warlock feels powerful, mobile, and fun. The melee-lock hybrid felt underwhelming and far less durable (oddly enough).

[Artagon]

Overall, the pure caster warlock feels powerful, mobile, and fun. The melee-lock hybrid felt underwhelming and far less durable (oddly enough).

I actually had the opposite experience.. my aura did significantly more damage than yours... only 35? Did you have any spell power? did you have a pact on? Out of curiousity, did you use the cleaves? Did you have metamagic turned on for them? I was gathering giants up in GH explorer and I could wipe out an entire group by doing the cleaves one after another, then mopping up the 1-2 that were left over.

[richieelias27]

Made two warlocks last night to test things out. Just went to 20th, no epic destinies, no epic gear. Just 20th level stuff from the Eveningstar collection merchants.

20th level pure warlock. Went out into King's Forest and started running around fighting. Mobs just melted away, and I only had to use CMW now and then to heal up (and was healing for about 160-200 per cast, for zero mana). Never had to stop. Went and found one of the dragons, melted it into goo. Barely took any damage. Felt very powerful.

16th level warlock / 4th level paladin. Same deal, headed into King's Forest and started fighting. Had to use heal a LOT more. The aura pulses WAY too slowly, and does too little damage. It was hitting mobs for 35 or so every 3 seconds, which was abysmal. Mobs took 2-3 times as long to kill with my greataxe + aura vs just pewpewing.

Haven't tried a warlock/bard yet for swashbuckling, but I'll give that a go next time I log in.

Overall, the pure caster warlock feels powerful, mobile, and fun. The melee-lock hybrid felt underwhelming and far less durable (oddly enough).

16 levels of Warlock, but your aura was only hitting for 35ish? Either you did something wrong, or something was very bugged. Even your lowest hits should be in the 200's after adding everything together.

[Jarlos]

Brimstone Blast - Duration: 1 round/5 caster levels. For every round the enemy fails his Reflex save, he takes 2d6 fire damage. Once a save is made, it stops. Does not stack.
Hideous Blow - Blast shape. Melee attack channels an eldritch blast

The Chain shape could also be like this:
Eldritch Chain - Blast jumps to caster level/5 secondary targets. All secondary targets take half damage.



nice ideas :)



How about giving the warlock a 4th enhancement line, adding the "hellfire warlock" prestigeclass ?


Level Features gained

1 Hellfire Blast +2d6
2 Hellfire Blast +4d6, Summon Baatezu, Resistance to Fire 10
3 Hellfire Blast +6d6, Hellfire Shield


Hellfire Blast

Whenever you use your Eldritch blast ability, you can change your Eldritch blast into a hellfire blast. A hellfire blast deals your normal Eldritch blast damage plus an extra 2d6 points of damage per class level. If your blast hits multiple targets (for example, the Eldritch chain or Eldritch cone blast shape invocations), each target takes the extra damage. This damage is not fire damage. Hellfire burns hotter than any normal fire.

Each time you use this ability, you take 1 point of Constitution damage. This is mainly because of the dangerous nature of Hellfire this supernatural flame burns your enemies flesh and soul, but also takes a little of you as well. If you do not have a Constitution score or are somehow immune to Constitution damage, the ability remains usable.


Resistance to Fire

At 2nd level, you gain resistance to fire 10. This resistance stacks with any resistance to fire you have gained from warlock class levels.


Summon Baatezu

Once per day, the Hellfire Warlock can randomly summon a Baatezu from the Nine Hells to fight for the party. Control of the Baatezu lasts for a number of rounds equal to 1 round per hellfire warlock level + 1d8 + their Charisma bonus. When the ability expires, the caster loses dominance over the Baatezu - which can have disastrous consequences, as devils typically despise being bothered by lesser beings. The caster is advised not to leave this up to chance, and dispel this summons before this time is up, sending the Baatezu back to the Nine Hells - though the devil might not attack, this method is the only certain way of avoiding a violent confrontation with the angry creature.


Hellfire Shield

You can call up hellfire to surround yourself with a protective barrier. Whenever someone directs a melee attack against you, you can, as an immediate action, aim a blast of hellfire at that creature. This blast deals damage equal to your eldritch blast (including bonus damage from the hellfire blast ability). This blast automatically strikes the target, which can attempt a Reflex saving throw for half damage (DC 10 + 1/2 your character level + your Cha modifier).

Each time you use this ability, you take 1 point of Constitution damage. This is mainly because of the dangerous nature of Hellfire this supernatural flame burns your enemies flesh and soul, but also takes a little of you as well. If you do not have a Constitution score or are somehow immune to Constitution damage, the ability remains usable.


Source : http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Hellfire_Warlock


Another abilities that i am missing are :


Cold Iron/Damage Reduction

Beginning with "Damage reduction 1/cold iron" at lvl 3. This increases by +1 every four level thereafter.



Fiendish Resilience

Once per day, for 20 rounds, the Warlock gains fast healing. The value is 1 point from 8th level, 2 points from 13th level and 5 points from 18th level.

(http://nwn2.wikia.com/wiki/Warlock)


Thx for reading! I hope u can make a use of these ideas!

Greetings Jarlos

[Vargouille]

Did you give up on the alignment restritiosn by pact? if so bad form

No, we're still working on them.


- Enhancements like Scourge and Just Reward from AOV: will they count if the blast is unmodified force? will they count if Fiend is taken (always fire)? WIll they count if Retribution (always light) from Enlightened Spirit is taken?
Basic attack Eldritch Blasts won't count for any of these. The activated Eldritch Burst and Spirit Blast will count for Light.


- Will crit enhancers from enhancements like AOV Smiting affect them?

- Will crit enhancers from items/weapons like Sage's Spectacles (assuming fiend) and Shadowmail affect them?

- Will things that trigger off any offefensive spell (like Interrogation from Divine Crusader) be triggered by them?

- WIll Energy Criticals past life affect crit chance?

All spell critical chance and damage bonuses will affect Eldritch Blast damage for the corresponding damage types.

Abilities that trigger off any offensive spell will generally trigger from of Eldritch Blast.

Some or all of these have probably been confirmed already on Lamannia.


I haven't played with Warlock much yet. Is this true? Another secondary caster (only 6 spell levels) class is going to get stupidly high spell DCs, higher than the full caster classes?
No.

[Wongar]

Basic attack Eldritch Blasts won't count for any of these. The activated Eldritch Burst and Spirit Blast will count for Light.

All spell critical chance and damage bonuses will affect Eldritch Blast damage for the corresponding damage types.

Abilities that trigger off any offensive spell will generally trigger from of Eldritch Blast.

Some or all of these have probably been confirmed already on Lamannia.


Thank you for the response.
My apologies if this is on Lamannia, I have not been able to get on Lamannia.

Given the variable and varied nature of Eldritch Blast, will there be any way to see what it is currently doing and what is affecting it? For example hovering over an icon and seeing:
base damage dice, damage type, %crit
pact damage dice, damage type, %crit
other damage dice (ex: Retribution), damage type, %crit
current shape & affects
current essence & affects

[Vargouille]

Thank you for the response.
My apologies if this is on Lamannia, I have not been able to get on Lamannia.

Given the variable and varied nature of Eldritch Blast, will there be any way to see what it is currently doing and what is affecting it? For example hovering over an icon and seeing:
base damage dice, damage type, %crit
pact damage dice, damage type, %crit
other damage dice (ex: Retribution), damage type, %crit
current shape & affects
current essence & affects

We may try to provide some better feedback. The damage dice will be tracked by feats given to you, so you can mouseover those to see how many base + Pact damage you should be doing. It's not clear we'll have time to put them all into one place, like weapons do, as nice as that would be.

[Gralhota]

Pure Warlock seems OP ( him have all Wizard usefull spells )

Sound effect eldritch is awfull.


I pass



Waiting U27 and fix lack Wizard Boss DPS.

[Steve_Howe]

Pure Warlock seems OP ( him have all Wizard usefull spells )

I see boring but I DEFINITELY don't see OP. If anything, it's Under Powered.

[HastyPudding]

I see boring but I DEFINITELY don't see OP. If anything, it's Under Powered.

I see it as being a sort of balance. Wizard has the highest potential DC's of the two, but warlock has the highest dps of the two. Each falls behind where the other pulls ahead. Wizard definitely falls behind in dps, esp due to their lack of spell points compared to sorcerers, but they get 5 extra feats to spend on spellcasting and start 3 DC's ahead of warlock to begin with.

[Uska]

No, we're still working on them.


Basic attack Eldritch Blasts won't count for any of these. The activated Eldritch Burst and Spirit Blast will count for Light.



All spell critical chance and damage bonuses will affect Eldritch Blast damage for the corresponding damage types.

Abilities that trigger off any offensive spell will generally trigger from of Eldritch Blast.

Some or all of these have probably been confirmed already on Lamannia.


No.

Thank you feel better now:) not good but better

[Gralhota]

I see it as being a sort of balance. Wizard has the highest potential DC's of the two, but warlock has the highest dps of the two. Each falls behind where the other pulls ahead. Wizard definitely falls behind in dps, esp due to their lack of spell points compared to sorcerers, but they get 5 extra feats to spend on spellcasting and start 3 DC's ahead of warlock to begin with.



I've stayed a few months without playing , I went back played for 2-3 weeks (I did heroic TR ) .

Now I 'm not playing . I'm not farming items , I just wanted to play but no groups to EE and due to lack of DPS wizard I can not solo. Breaking Ranks, WGU etc...

Breaking the Ranks EE I die in the last wave because my mana over and I do not use mana pots .

In LFMs Warlocks banned wizards , since Warloks has all the usable spells the wizard and more DPS .

Wizards have no identity or utility .


+ Off Topic + cry
Not the place , more please correct tree EK, 6 AP + 30 mana + 30 CD for eldritch tempest is a bad taste joke .

3 AP would still be bad, and the proposed shield is ridiculous .

I am a battle mage and spent only 6 pts in the tree EK .

[Madja]

Is it wrong of me to hope that you don't find a way to implement alignments on pacts? I'd really just hate to be forced into Fey if I want to multi-class paladin :rolleyes:

[Blackheartox]

I see it as being a sort of balance. Wizard has the highest potential DC's of the two, but warlock has the highest dps of the two. Each falls behind where the other pulls ahead. Wizard definitely falls behind in dps, esp due to their lack of spell points compared to sorcerers, but they get 5 extra feats to spend on spellcasting and start 3 DC's ahead of warlock to begin with.

Wizzards wont be ahead of dcs of warlock, if anything warlock will be ahead of wizzys in dc department.
Cores and synergy with blast debuffs and ability to be in exalted put warlock ahead in any school he wants to specialize in

[AlexIII]

so far, my assesment:

once you start getting into the class, its pretty fun. But please, please do something about the delay on the first eldritch blast. Unfortunately, at level Warlock is a bit too op, though it makes solo leveling easy.

lv 1: blast damage too small, relatively under-powered but considering how easy Korthos is still fine.

by lv 4 your op. blasts deal with anything you can see, chain lets you blast everything at once.

this continues up to level 18(when I stopped), staunch basically lets you tank any thing at level for the few seconds it takes to slaughter them. Because EB is force and sonic (i picked fey pact) you have very little need for offensive spells, so you can put your entire spell point pool and selection into buffs and defense (things don't live long enough for debuffing to be sensible). Its pretty op.

for example, two uses of stanch (I was level 14 on lv 13 assault on summer-field) no kiting the boss, had about ~16 temp hp left over and he and his minions dealt no real damage. . I used the lv 9 sor gear with an augment or two: definitely under-geared.

At lv 18 ran finding the path on normal (with the same gear from before), similar deal though I did kite.

yes I know that these are not hard quests, but under-geared, no build plan, and I still didn't need to think beyond kite-blast and boss-stanch

my two cents on the matter, though this might be too hard:
I would start with 2d6 damage at lv 1, but let EB only get half-spell-power, and increase cast time(except first cast!) somewhat.
For the chain EB shape, have it reduce the damage to ~ 70% of normal. or reducing damage by half for secondary targets.

These last two thing are not strictly warlock, but related : what all casters hope for, could a spell component pouch be in ddo's future? (2), for lammania I often use tp to buy things I normaly find in game, like tomes, the kit of potions, etc. Could we see the tp guy come back to lamania or added to the dojo on one of the next few update previews? (if I missed him in the dojo, my bad. Please take pity and point out where I can find him)

Also, I think a lot of the methods for removing sp for warlocks would make the class feel unique, more balanced, and more fun. Each method will take some work, but I think it would be well worth it.

[AlexIII]

Is it wrong of me to hope that you don't find a way to implement alignments on pacts? I'd really just hate to be forced into Fey if I want to multi-class paladin :rolleyes:

It really doesn't make sense for a stallwart defender of law and good to deal with devils or mind-breaking-reality-crushing beings from beyond.

[Celestialbeast]

(2), for lammania I often use tp to buy things I normaly find in game, like tomes, the kit of potions, etc. Could we see the tp guy come back to lamania or added to the dojo on one of the next few update previews? (if I missed him in the dojo, my bad. Please take pity and point out where I can find him)



If you're looking straight ahead on the first platform the points guy is to the right of Fred

[AlexIII]

If you're looking straight ahead on the first platform the points guy is to the right of Fred

Many thanks friend

[InfraRiot]

First some animation points:

Nice to hear that the staff-through-your-head and other weapon related animations are not final and the goal is for weapons to be hidden while casting. Regarding the pacts I've only tried Fey and planned to make a Fey warlock on Live but now I'm not sure. This pact damage changes the cool EB look to a completely boring white blob that flies slowly through the air. I feel like I'm flinging the ghosts from Pac-Man and it's a huge let down. I was actually glad that the chain animation is bugged because that looks fine with the pact damage glowing in your hands only. I hope the pacts would only change the colour of the normal blast instead of modifying it too much. It just looks very boring right now and it feels very weak. You should feel some POWER and OOMF in these shots! The first shot needs to start firing faster and the shots need to go where you aim the reticle and not just straight ahead.

General EB points:

Regarding the EB in general I think there's some lost potential here. Right now you just auto-attack and it's the same thing over and over again without any change. Why not change this to work like to-hit chain on weapons where you get a bigger bonus in the end of the chain. Instead of to-hit change this to damage for EBs and make the last EB do more damage. It would be more fun in my opinion to start with a less damaging EB, and then increase the damage until the last attack which would be both bigger looking and dealing more damage. This would bring some satisfaction to the casting -> 1 boom, 2 bigger boom, 3 biggest BOOM. Would be more fun to watch the mobs taking more and bigger damage from the last attack. Also it would looks like the Warlock is conjuring these blasts and once he gets into a momementum he flings them at greater speed/power. Right now it's a bit too passive with just holding the mouse button down and keep on flinging the same things. Perhaps something like 85% SP first blast, 100% SP, second blast and 125% SP last blast and maybe +5% crit and +25% crit damage. For the chain/cone you can of course have different values.

The chain EB again is very easy-mode and the bouncing of the chain makes it really easy to hide behind corners and nooks and aim at 1 mob while killing 4 (casters especially are easy to kill while breaking LoS) so maybe make the chain range shorter and up the damage instead as a whole, but reduce the last two bounces to 50% SP.

Pact spells:

Again only commenting Fey. Like others have said Fey gets maybe too much CC. As much as I'd like to make an enchanter Warlock I feel that we're getting a bit too many goodies from the pact, but I don't know what to replace them with since it fits the Fey theme. I play an enchanter AM and a Fey Warlock can get maybe a bit too close even if the hypno, otto's resisitible dance and hold monster SLAs are very good and cheap for the AM. Best would of course be to get new spells so Warlocks feel different from CC/necro wizards, sorcerers and bards. Oh and Dark Delirium is very strong and completely free to cast and is also a perma daze since the duration matches the CD. Perhaps reduce the duration to 15 seconds instead of 20.

Testing:

I did some testing with a geared Fey Tainted Scholar (41+ AP) at lvl 28 and while I thougt the damage was quite low the speed and the ease of kiting made the EEs i tried seem quite easy. The confusion proc and chain EBing enemies made for some interesting encounters. Right now the biggest weakness of the class are the saves. If you get CCed you're very screwed. However, things got silly when I tried out Shiradi. The chain EB is very OP in Shiradi with nerve venom especially. It doesn't matter if the damage is low because everything is sooner or later made helpless and spammed to death with all kinds of Shiradi effects proccing all the time. I went to EE Fleshmakers and just went in blasting. Little kiting and jumping around while holding the mouse button down it was very easy to kill everything very fast (thanks to venom + procs). The dps is of course lacking vs bosses and you can't really take hits, but as a party/utility character the warlock will obliterate trash especially in Shiradi. Probably need Soul Eater against bosses because you get DoTs.

The class felt obviously weaker in other destinies, but I still found the class quite fun. I felt like I was using spells more (for example in exalted angel) than the EB because it got a bit tiring even with stunning shot and the "fireball" shot. Even if that stunning shot works all the time now it's slow to use and once the DC is fixed it won't be good enough in epics and will be quite useless unfortunately. Please look at the DC. The fireball shot seems to proc twice but still does very little damage. Not asking for a hellball here but it should do more damage for a t5 and scale for epics. I would hope for at least one more SLA shot and things to do in combat like melees who have at least a few clickies. The EB toggles also have to be made faster so you can more easily change it in combat.

I left out commenting some stuff that is not WAI or devs have already confirmed to look at.

[Nascoe]

I've stayed a few months without playing , I went back played for 2-3 weeks (I did heroic TR ) .

Now I 'm not playing . I'm not farming items , I just wanted to play but no groups to EE and due to lack of DPS wizard I can not solo. Breaking Ranks, WGU etc...

Breaking the Ranks EE I die in the last wave because my mana over and I do not use mana pots .

In LFMs Warlocks banned wizards , since Warloks has all the usable spells the wizard and more DPS .

Wizards have no identity or utility .


+ Off Topic + cry
Not the place , more please correct tree EK, 6 AP + 30 mana + 30 CD for eldritch tempest is a bad taste joke .

3 AP would still be bad, and the proposed shield is ridiculous .

I am a battle mage and spent only 6 pts in the tree EK .

You do know that Warlocks are not yet on live, right? I doubt that a new class that will be introduced in the (near) future has much influence on LFMs right now. Yes, EK is not a great tree, its mostly used in mixed melee builds. Does not have much to do with Warlock either, nor with LFMs (although its a good example of where NOT to take Warlock trees).

I think you are better off looking on the relevant server for either guilds that are taking in new members or posting where / what / when you play to find some buddies to play with instead of putting the blame on Warlocks. In the mean time, just play the quests on EH if you are doing solo and don't want to risk not making it (or EN as its far easier/faster to complete).

[Blackheartox]

I haven't played with Warlock much yet. Is this true? Another secondary caster (only 6 spell levels) class is going to get stupidly high spell DCs, higher than the full caster classes? Wizards was already ahead of other primary casters, and Warlocks are ahead of that? So when they start balancing DCs against Warlock DCs, other classes are just screwed?

Sigh.

Making one or a few options vastly better than others doesn't promote build variety and creativity.

And it doesn't make me want to turn my DC caster into a Warlock, either; it just makes me less likely to bother playing at all.

Yes that is correct, i will provide a simple breakdown here that is solid enough proof on that claim that warlocks will be best dc casters.
First of all il use a pmaster focused in necromancy vs a warlock focused on necromancy, in terms of necromancy warlocks will be the best.

Ok what does a pm get that is unique?

Lets go a pm focused on lich form with diping into archmage for 1 dc in that tree.
So a pm would have:
-2 int from capstone for 1 dc
-3 dc ahead of warlock due to lv 9 heigten capability
-1 dc from necromatic focus tier 5 in pm tree
-4 int from improved lich and 1 dc from lich for a total of 3 dc
-1 dc from archmage when specialized in necromancy.

That is a total of 9 dc that warlock has to fight against.

Warlock who goes souleater and tainted scholar aka 41 points into scholar for capstone and 32 into souleater for finger and rest into drow for charisma.
That is just a example how i am thinking to build it, there are many other ways but this one gives most dps and dcs for my playstyle, i will tinker around with it when souleater hits lama tho.

Ok so warlock needs to fight against the 9 dc deficit, here we go:
- 3 dc from exalted, 2 cores and 1 from aura, bye bye heighten benefit
- 4 char from capstone instead of 2
- tainted scholar has 2 dc in cores
- 1 necro/enchant/ilussion focus in souleater in t4
- in case you want to skip finger and focus on sholar there is 1 more dc there from planar focus but i wont take that so skiping on it for now.
-souleater has a blast upgrade that aplies a 1 fort save debuff on enemies you hit with blasts ranged spells that stacks 4 times for a total of 4 dc
- souleater has a 2 sec cd for a shaken effect for 2 more dc, making it very nice in rotation with finger sla
-taken cookies give 2 charisma, there is no stacking int unique cookie in game
-souleater has a nice buff in tier 3 that gives d2+8 charisma buff that is insigh, if we average it to 4+d2 so lets say 5/6 it is still head by 2-3 points giving potential 2-3 dc above wizz /you still want shadowcaster instead of 4 int armor imo.
- depravity clickie that gives 2 dc for 20 seconds every 60 seconds, goes very nice with cds on wail circle finger

I miss prolly many things from warlock but this simple projection shows that warlock that was behind wizz by 9 dc before checking trees comes up ahead with total of 19 dc ( i picked minimum values, it can and prolly will be higer on live), above wiz by 10.

I mean i dont want to nitpick, not to give max buff to walrock and some other stuff, but the thing is, while a pm or cleric or sorc that focus on dcs sacrifice dps in return a warlock doesnt.
You still get full crit line this way, wings, full damage line, heal from exalted and synergy with light/force/sonic spellpower being the prolly best arcane caster.

I dont mind this at all, since this way casters will be on even ground with melles, and to ballance others since warlock will be utterly broken, you will need to buff up rest of casters, i personally am sick of melles being so dominant in ddo.
Also as we know that enemies have extra saves vs magic now, a blast that is cone shaped or chain shaped can reduce the at 100% hp save bonus and apply shaken and fortitude debuff with 1 blast aoeish on multiple mobs (i assume that shaken will proc only on 1 mob thus this is useful only for finger rotation), so the "blasts" will actually have its uses if we plan to play dc casters.
As it is now, imo warlocks will make best dps arcanes, best shiradi arcanes and best dc arcanes.
Im trying hard to figure out a weakness, but honestly i cant see it, i thought that not having immunities would be a major one, but knowing how much ahead they are with dcs we can simply create pure bf warlocks and yea.. Dominate

In case we leverage and drop down 3-4 dcs we still can get a v nice ability in souleater tree:


Feed on Magic: (2 AP) When you strike an opponent with your melee attacks, ranged attacks or Eldritch Blast there is a chance equal to half Warlock level for you to gain 30 temporary spell points. This can occur no more than once per 6 seconds.


This means that on every blast we have a 14% chance to get 30 free sp which makes the "low sp pool some people claim warlock will have" while in "exalted" pretty much a rather bad argument.

I can name many more things that come to mind


I know this post will attract alot of hate from people who alrdy plan to abuse warlocks, but friend said i should post this.
Honestly idc, i will be playing warlock either way, 9 mrr is to good to skip on

[Rhysem]

I assume not being able to swap pacts with fred is a known issue? I suppose it applies to FvS too, wouldn't it?

[Iriale]

Yes that is correct, i will provide a simple breakdown here that is solid enough proof on that claim that warlocks will be best dc casters.
First of all il use a pmaster focused in necromancy vs a warlock focused on necromancy, in terms of necromancy warlocks will be the best.
Yes, that is correct, but devs don't want to see it. But meh the wizard lost his DC supremacy long time ago. The warlock DC supremacy won't be a surprise for any wizzie player (serious player, of course, casual players don't count)

But, don't mind. Wizard is a dead class. As proud undeads, DC wizards yet walk and some players have not noticed that, but the class is dead already. In an environment where dps rules, the class with the lowest dps and worse mana endurance of the game doesn't have future. In the DC department, everything a wizard can do, other classes can do better, and in some cases can do faster. So far, the only thing that partially saved the class was than in any other class it was difficult -or impossible- to gather all DC spells in a single build, while the wizard had it easier. Now, with the warlock having ALL spells useful for the wizard, not even this is true.

Anyway, is not important. Wizard class has no future in this game. Maybe we should worry more about how will affect to the sorcerer, which at least is not a dead class... yet.



I dont mind this at all, since this way casters will be on even ground with melles, and to ballance others since warlock will be utterly broken, you will need to buff up rest of casters, i personally am sick of melles being so dominant in ddo.
I'm sick too, but I don't think that devs buff casters in at least 2 years (there are too many things first in their list…), with warlock broken or no broken. Actually, I doubt they are aware of the real problems of casters. Their unique approach to solve the serious problem of mana endurance that we have now has been at least warm. If I have to be honest, seems more like a joke than anything else.



Also as we know that enemies have extra saves vs magic now, a blast that is cone shaped or chain shaped can reduce the at 100% hp save bonus and apply shaken and fortitude debuff with 1 blast aoeish on multiple mobs (i assume that shaken will proc only on 1 mob thus this is useful only for finger rotation), so the "blasts" will actually have its uses if we plan to play dc casters.
As it is now, imo warlocks will make best dps arcanes, best shiradi arcanes and best dc arcanes.
Im trying hard to figure out a weakness, but honestly i cant see it, i thought that not having immunities would be a major one, but knowing how much ahead they are with dcs we can simply create pure bf warlocks and yea.. Dominate
+1


I haven't played with Warlock much yet. Is this true? Another secondary caster (only 6 spell levels) class is going to get stupidly high spell DCs, higher than the full caster classes? Wizards was already ahead of other primary casters, and Warlocks are ahead of that? So when they start balancing DCs against Warlock DCs, other classes are just screwed?

Sigh.

Making one or a few options vastly better than others doesn't promote build variety and creativity.

And it doesn't make me want to turn my DC caster into a Warlock, either; it just makes me less likely to bother playing at all.

(to Sir Val)
No.
Saying that is a big mistake, Varg. We have repeatedly shown that warlock has more DC than the wizard. Close your eyes to reality, Varg, will not change this simple fact. That is not new, of course. Today it is difficult to find a (spellcaster) class that does not exceed the wizard in this regard.

How many times in these forums we have warned about troublesome things, and yet you (devs) have refused to consider them? Stop closing your eyes, please.

But now I have a question for you. What was your idea to become the warlock in an arcane primary spellcaster, very unlike the pnp warlock? What niche do you want give it? How you thought avoid that warlock stepping on the other classes? Would not have been easier to create a lot of stuff for Eldritch blast, leave it as the warlock primary skill (for melee too, eldritch glaive would have been awesome), and leave his invocations as they are in pnp... less powerful than spells level 7-9?

[Iriale]

This means that on every blast we have a 14% chance to get 30 free sp which makes the "low sp pool some people claim warlock will have" while in "exalted" pretty much a rather bad argument.
It's not only this, although is a big boost. Simply the free dps is GREAT for mana endurance. People should understand that what matters is not how big is your mana pool, but how endure to do your job. Indeed, who has more mana, a pure sorcerer or a shiradi sorcerer? Obviously, pure, but what blue bar last longer? The reduced number of spell points of a warlock is misleading, because his mana endurance is amazing, in the same way that if you duplicate the number of spell points of the actual wizard, will remain a class with serious problems of mana because his efficiency using them is awful.

So, dear players, do not look at the size of the warlock's blue bar, watch his MANA ENDURANCE before start saying "poor warlock, he has few spell points." And devs, please... when you begin to fix the problems of spellcasters in epic, start with mana endurance. One of the main problems is that currently with full metamagic the damage is not too bad, but then the blue bar lasts half combat (less if you're a wizard xdd)!

[PuppiesAndRainbows]

From what I've seen so far I'd recommend warlock to someone who is new to DDO and hadn't played PnP.

Its a nice class for someone who wants to play a magic user and be able to start lobbing balls of magic from the get go.

People who have played PnP know wizards and sorcerers start out weak and build up to great abilities.
They'll put up with the slow character build up being rewarded later on.

Someone unfamiliar with PnP who wants to hop in and start zapping things isn't going to be very satisfied with running out of mana after a few minutes and then using a slow and ineffective wand until they get to a shrine.

Here is why it will be a lot more fun for new players.

Warlocks will give a new player the feeling of welding magic.
heal themselves
always on protection from magic missiles
death ward
all elemental resists with one buff
the warlock special effects....are special

[fangblackhawk]

First some animation points:



General EB points:

Regarding the EB in general I think there's some lost potential here. Right now you just auto-attack and it's the same thing over and over again without any change. Why not change this to work like to-hit chain on weapons where you get a bigger bonus in the end of the chain. Instead of to-hit change this to damage for EBs and make the last EB do more damage. It would be more fun in my opinion to start with a less damaging EB, and then increase the damage until the last attack which would be both bigger looking and dealing more damage. This would bring some satisfaction to the casting -> 1 boom, 2 bigger boom, 3 biggest BOOM. Would be more fun to watch the mobs taking more and bigger damage from the last attack. Also it would looks like the Warlock is conjuring these blasts and once he gets into a momementum he flings them at greater speed/power. Right now it's a bit too passive with just holding the mouse button down and keep on flinging the same things. Perhaps something like 85% SP first blast, 100% SP, second blast and 125% SP last blast and maybe +5% crit and +25% crit damage. For the chain/cone you can of course have different values.




Toataly down with a 9000 skull factor kamehameha ..... (i am thinking a warlock with dim door and radient bursts would make a great cyrstal cove torch runner over my current plan for dragon marked human radeint servant)

[Gralhota]

You do know that Warlocks are not yet on live, right? I doubt that a new class that will be introduced in the (near) future has much influence on LFMs right now. Yes, EK is not a great tree, its mostly used in mixed melee builds. Does not have much to do with Warlock either, nor with LFMs (although its a good example of where NOT to take Warlock trees).

I think you are better off looking on the relevant server for either guilds that are taking in new members or posting where / what / when you play to find some buddies to play with instead of putting the blame on Warlocks. In the mean time, just play the quests on EH if you are doing solo and don't want to risk not making it (or EN as its far easier/faster to complete).



You know I played with Warlock in Lammania? No you do not.

You know the influence to which I referred was on the Wizards. No you do not know, maybe some deficiency in text interpretation.

You know I'm already on my third life playing with Wizards mellee? No you do not.

You know that I play in Cannith? No you do not. By the way, arguing about server is already irrelevant that what you see in the forum is the increasingly growing demand for merger servers, but that you do not know.

Do you know what country I reside? You know of my schedules and commitments to work and college? Do not you DO NOT KNOW!

You know I'm in a guild level 100+? You know the schedules of the players this guild? No you do not.

You know that EH is easy for me, without challenge and NO FUN? No you do not know!

The only thing u know is that EK is not a big tree, it is a tree of ****. Tenser toogle? Ridiculous, since u need 5 levels of Wizard and can use tenser scroll. Great benefit to mixed melee builds spend many AP this tree.

Do not blame me, continue playing with his friends, congratulations

[Harusennin]

Dont nerf Eldritch Blast Chain, just put at the top of the tree. Its only powerful early game.

[AlexIII]

Yes that is correct, i will provide a simple breakdown here that is solid enough proof on that claim that warlocks will be best dc casters.
First of all il use a pmaster focused in necromancy vs a warlock focused on necromancy, in terms of necromancy warlocks will be the best.

Ok what does a pm get that is unique?

Lets go a pm focused on lich form with diping into archmage for 1 dc in that tree.
So a pm would have:
-2 int from capstone for 1 dc
-3 dc ahead of warlock due to lv 9 heigten capability
-1 dc from necromatic focus tier 5 in pm tree
-4 int from improved lich and 1 dc from lich for a total of 3 dc
-1 dc from archmage when specialized in necromancy.

That is a total of 9 dc that warlock has to fight against.

Warlock who goes souleater and tainted scholar aka 41 points into scholar for capstone and 32 into souleater for finger and rest into drow for charisma.
That is just a example how i am thinking to build it, there are many other ways but this one gives most dps and dcs for my playstyle, i will tinker around with it when souleater hits lama tho.

Ok so warlock needs to fight against the 9 dc defecit, here we go:
- 3 dc from exalted, 2 cores and 1 from aura, bye bye heighten benefit
- 4 char from capstone instead of 2
- tainted scholar has 2 dc in cores
- 1 necro/enchant/ilussion focus in souleater in t4
- in case you want to skip finger and focus on sholar there is 1 more dc there from planar focus but i wont take that so skiping on it for now.
-souleater has a blast upgrade that aplies a 1 fort save debuff on enemies you hit with blasts ranged spells that stacks 4 times for a total of 4 dc
- souleater has a 2 sec cd for a shaken effect for 2 more dc, making it very nice in rotation with finger sla
-taken cookies give 2 charisma, there is no stacking int unique cookie in game
-souleater has a nice buff in tier 3 that gives d2+8 charisma buff that is insigh, if we average it to 4+d2 so lets say 5/6 it is still head by 2-3 points giving potential 2-3 dc above wizz /you still want shadowcaster instead of 4 int armor imo.
- depravity clickie that gives 2 dc for 20 seconds every 60 seconds, goes very nice with cds on wail circle finger

I miss prolly many things from warlock but this simple projection shows that warlock that was behind wizz by 9 dc before checking trees comes up ahead with total of 19 dc ( i picked minimum values, it can and prolly will be higer on live), above wiz by 10.

I mean i dont want to nitpick, not to give max buff to walrock and some other stuff, but the thing is, while a pm or cleric or sorc that focus on dcs sacrifice dps in return a warlock doesnt.
You still get full crit line this way, wings, full damage line, heal from exalted and synergy with light/force/sonic spellpower being the prolly best arcane caster.

I dont mind this at all, since this way casters will be on even ground with melles, and to ballance others since warlock will be utterly broken, you will need to buff up rest of casters, i personally am sick of melles being so dominant in ddo.
Also as we know that enemies have extra saves vs magic now, a blast that is cone shaped or chain shaped can reduce the at 100% hp save bonus and apply shaken and fortitude debuff with 1 blast aoeish on multiple mobs (i assume that shaken will proc only on 1 mob thus this is useful only for finger rotation), so the "blasts" will actually have its uses if we plan to play dc casters.
As it is now, imo warlocks will make best dps arcanes, best shiradi arcanes and best dc arcanes.
Im trying hard to figure out a weakness, but honestly i cant see it, i thought that not having immunities would be a major one, but knowing how much ahead they are with dcs we can simply create pure bf warlocks and yea.. Dominate

In case we leverage and drop down 3-4 dcs we still can get a v nice ability in souleater tree:


Feed on Magic: (2 AP) When you strike an opponent with your melee attacks, ranged attacks or Eldritch Blast there is a chance equal to half Warlock level for you to gain 30 temporary spell points. This can occur no more than once per 6 seconds.


This means that on every blast we have a 14% chance to get 30 free sp which makes the "low sp pool some people claim warlock will have" while in "exalted" pretty much a rather bad argument.

I can name many more things that come to mind


I know this post will attract alot of hate from people who alrdy plan to abuse warlocks, but friend said i should post this.
Honestly idc, i will be playing warlock either way, 9 mrr is to good to skip on

Well said



Yes, that is correct, but devs don't want to see it. But meh the wizard lost his DC supremacy long time ago. The warlock DC supremacy won't be a surprise for any wizzie player (serious player, of course, casual players don't count)

But, don't mind. Wizard is a dead class. As proud undeads, DC wizards yet walk and some players have not noticed that, but the class is dead already. In an environment where dps rules, the class with the lowest dps and worse mana endurance of the game doesn't have future. In the DC department, everything a wizard can do, other classes can do better, and in some cases can do faster. So far, the only thing that partially saved the class was than in any other class it was difficult -or impossible- to gather all DC spells in a single build, while the wizard had it easier. Now, with the warlock having ALL spells useful for the wizard, not even this is true.

Anyway, is not important. Wizard class has no future in this game. Maybe we should worry more about how will affect to the sorcerer, which at least is not a dead class... yet.


I'm sick too, but I don't think that devs buff casters in at least 2 years (there are too many things first in their list…), with warlock broken or no broken. Actually, I doubt they are aware of the real problems of casters. Their unique approach to solve the serious problem of mana endurance that we have now has been at least warm. If I have to be honest, seems more like a joke than anything else.


Wizards are admittedly under-powered compared to other casters, but I wouldn't say there past the point of no return, and still function though you need to work for it a little. But with all the changes to the game, casters definitively need some love, wizards in particular. Please make this a priority, as I love casters, wizards in particular. With the release of a new caster, this would be a fine update to include it in even if delayed it a bit.


I think I speak for most players, when I say we would prefer better, more balanced content even if it meant 'less' of it. In my opinion, even if update 26 needs to be pushed back by a few months and we had no summer update, it would be better than releasing the last nail in the wizards coffin, before giving them a hand out of it.

I also think many players would love a update that was "we fixed a bunch of bugs and did a little rework on some spells and classes (wizards get a buff), started updating cannith crafting to the new item enchantments, added a quick 'epic greensteal' (Tier 3 green steel + tokens of the twelve, boosts all the enchantments up to epic level works)(if there is a plan to add T4+ green steel in the near future, :) and ignore this item. ) " looking back, that seems like a largish update.

I couldn't find the original post, but whoever said that wizard versatility was a myth +1. There are a few spells which I would add, but you really can only focus on 2 schools, and most schools don't have enough spells to make it worth it. makes the 'extremely flexible and diverse' spell-caster very limited endgame.

[Iriale]

I couldn't find the original post, but whoever said that wizard versatility was a myth +1. There are a few spells which I would add, but you really can only focus on 2 schools, and most schools don't have enough spells to make it worth it. makes the 'extremely flexible and diverse' spell-caster very limited endgame.
I said that. I have a lot of experience playing spellcaster classes in this game, i know in where they are strong and in where they are weak. But the most ridiculous myth in this game is the wizard having a broad number of spells to choose. All serious players choose the same spells for their wizards, and those spells are amazing few--- is not only the heavy focus in 2 schools or the lack of spells in many scholls, is too that epics reduces the number of working spells. This is the reality, and devs thinking that wizards use all their spellbook in epics is a bad joke.

[Harusennin]

It's our intent that when you are Eldritch Blasting that your weapons won't show up, though that's not fully implmented yet.
Perfect, thank you.

Please dont make the warlock weaker because some ppl only want to play their vanilla chars. Dont put the warlock in lowest tier, we want him with the top tier classes.

[InfraRiot]

<snip>

Your breakdown seems correct except:


-souleater has a nice buff in tier 3 that gives d2+8 charisma buff that is insigh, if we average it to 4+d2 so lets say 5/6 it is still head by 2-3 points giving potential 2-3 dc above wizz /you still want shadowcaster instead of 4 int armor imo.




Dark Feeding: (2 AP) Multi-selector: Choose a magical attack with a cooldown of 16 seconds. Enemies can negate the ability score damage (but not your ability score gain) with a Will saving throw: DC of 14 + Character Level + Charisma Modifier. These effects do not stack with themselves.
[LIST]
Your Flesh is Weak: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Strength damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Strength for 20 seconds.
You Cannot Evade Me: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Dexterity damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Dexterity for 20 seconds.
Your Will is Mine: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Wisdom damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Wisdom for 20 seconds.
Food For Thought: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Intelligence damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Intelligence for 20 seconds.
Blood Feast: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Constitution damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Constitution for 20 seconds.



Charisma has been left out for obvious reasons. You can of course steal CON to lower the fort save of an enemy. Anyway if you look at Warlock straight +DC it's not so much, but it's rather the easy shaken and other debuffs thanks to EB in Soul Eater which makes up for the +3 DC initial heighten/spell level DC that wizards get and then some. So something should be done here. Perhaps remove the core DCs (or make them give +evocation only for the EB) and force a warlock to debuff before killing while a wizard doesn't have to and can just rely on a higher DC. *shrugs*

There is excellent synergy between Exalted Angel and a caster Warlock. First of all you get the +3DC from the core and you can get up to +6 charisma so that's already +3 DC over a wizard if we assume the wizard in Exalted too (if not then it's +3 DC anyway thanks to the core). Also the Warlock can take nice light spells from exalted which are based on the charisma stat alone, no evocation feats etc. needed. Just pump your charisma high and you get nice direct damage spells which the Warlock lacks. Drop 1 charisma and you can take both Sunbolt and Divine Wrath which is nice for some heals. You can easily twist in Energy Burst + Magister Necro/Enchant Focus. If you don't want to be a shiradi spammer then EA is the way to go for sure.

[Iriale]

Well said




Wizards are admittedly under-powered compared to other casters, but I wouldn't say there past the point of no return, and still function though you need to work for it a little. But with all the changes to the game, casters definitively need some love, wizards in particular. Please make this a priority, as I love casters, wizards in particular. With the release of a new caster, this would be a fine update to include it in even if delayed it a bit.


They are past the point of no return for 2 things. The first, devs don't think that there is a problem and there won't be fixes. Second, the current tendency of prioritize dps and only dps over all others specialized skills -trapping, CC, healing others- is especially detrimental to the wizard, since all his key skills do not work in bosses. The rogues are good with traps, but also have good dps. Clerics are no longer needed as specialized healers, but now have even better dps than wizards. But the wizard seems doomed to have no useful skills against bosses, and nowadays being good with the trash is very secondary. Designers have not even had the detail of let the wizard cast useful debuffs against bosses, as their dps is so bad.

While the DPS is so important and the wizzie is denied to be good at anything that does not involve the trash, it is doubtful that the class can to have a future in this game

[Iriale]

Your breakdown seems correct except:





Charisma has been left out for obvious reasons. You can of course steal CON to lower the fort save of an enemy. Anyway if you look at Warlock straight +DC it's not so much, but it's rather the easy shaken and other debuffs thanks to EB in Soul Eater which makes up for the +3 DC initial heighten/spell level DC that wizards get and then some. So something should be done here. Perhaps remove the core DCs (or make them give +evocation only for the EB) and force a warlock to debuff before killing while a wizard doesn't have to and can just rely on a higher DC. *shrugs*

There is excellent synergy between Exalted Angel and a caster Warlock. First of all you get the +3DC from the core and you can get up to +6 charisma so that's already +3 DC over a wizard if we assume the wizard in Exalted too (if not then it's +3 DC anyway thanks to the core). Also the Warlock can take nice light spells from exalted which are based on the charisma stat alone, no evocation feats etc. needed. Just pump your charisma high and you get nice direct damage spells which the Warlock lacks. Drop 1 charisma and you can take both Sunbolt and Divine Wrath which is nice for some heals. You can easily twist in Energy Burst + Magister Necro/Enchant Focus. If you don't want to be a shiradi spammer then EA is the way to go for sure.
Transcendental magic of Exalted Angel is another of those many small changes that were poorly implemented. The designers wanted to help wis-based spellcasters, but ended up being a stupid and not necessary boost to all cha-based spellcasters. As I have said many times, good ideas, good intentions, but wrong-minded details.

Anyways, don't forget that angelic presence gives +2 more of charisma. Exalted angel is a stupid boost to cha spellcasters, really stupid, an ED that gives very nice dps, and heals, and spell points, and the biggest boost of DC of all EDs. I cry when I compare it with Magister.

[AlexIII]

They are past the point of no return for 2 things. The first, devs don't think that there is a problem and there won't be fixes. Second, the current tendency of prioritize dps and only dps over all others specialized skills -trapping, CC, healing others- is especially detrimental to the wizard, since all his key skills do not work in bosses. The rogues are good with traps, but also have good dps. Clerics are no longer needed as specialized healers, but now have even better dps than wizards. But the wizard seems doomed to have no useful skills against bosses, and nowadays being good with the trash is very secondary. Designers have not even had the detail of let the wizard cast useful debuffs against bosses, as their dps is so bad.

While the DPS is so important and the wizzie is denied to be good at anything that does not involve the trash, it is doubtful that the class can to have a future in this game

If the dev's don't get the message, the class is dead. If they do, it wouldn't be hard to bring it up.

I took a lv 28 PM through the ToEE Epic normal with on a lv 3 primal avatar destiny with slightly under-leveled loot. Considering I'm two levels behind the norm, in a off destiny at half level, etc. the 2 reentries and 3 deaths, and I needed to run out of the boos fight with DDoor a half dozen times. Not optimal, but not salvageable.

It wouldn't be hard to give Wizzies a boost. at upper levels (10+ to prevent splashes giving the boost to other classes) give them a few free class abilities on the 'masters of knowledge' theme doubling or multiplying by 1.5 spell power from assorted sources and letting them add a fraction of spellcraft to save DC's (1/7 to 1/10 I think). At lv 20, give them a stacking reduction to all spell point costs for epic bags of hp immune to wizards forte's or give them a special bonus to red and purples names. I'd say add these to enhancements, but ALL wizards need them and since the new system only has a few that are restricted to characters that advance far in the class.

[Iriale]

If the dev's don't get the message, the class is dead. If they do, it wouldn't be hard to bring it up.

I took a lv 28 PM through the ToEE Epic normal with on a lv 3 primal avatar destiny with slightly under-leveled loot. Considering I'm two levels behind the norm, in a off destiny at half level, etc. the 2 reentries and 3 deaths, and I needed to run out of the boos fight with DDoor a half dozen times. Not optimal, but not salvageable.

It wouldn't be hard to give Wizzies a boost. at upper levels (10+ to prevent splashes giving the boost to other classes) give them a few free class abilities on the 'masters of knowledge' theme doubling or multiplying by 1.5 spell power from assorted sources and letting them add a fraction of spellcraft to save DC's (1/7 to 1/10 I think). At lv 20, give them a stacking reduction to all spell point costs for epic bags of hp immune to wizards forte's or give them a special bonus to red and purples names. I'd say add these to enhancements, but ALL wizards need them and since the new system only has a few that are restricted to characters that advance far in the class.
Of course that if devs give us fixes, the class will be viable. But the problem is that they think that there are not problems, and so wizards will be worse to every update. Really the needed fixes are not drastic: they need free metamagic in epics, a small but not big boost in dps (a burst dps, I think--if arcane tempest was better designed would do the trick...), a bigger spellbook en epics (for example, in heroics I can use banishment and works very well, in epic I can't; charms, the same, etc… devs, modify the epic ward, we need more spells working in epics, and let us not focus so heavy in only 2 schools, wizards should be good with all schools!), and some debuffs that work in bosses- it's all. But while devs don't want to do changes, the wizard is doomed in the current ddo.

And now the warlock, with the same spells, the same niche, better mana efficiency, better DC, free and better dps... how not think that the wizard is dead?

[jerray1973]

My Cure Moderate ability from the Enlightened tree does not appear to use any SP as stated in the description (not that I minded :) ) and no matter how I do my stats it will not let me cast Resist Energy - it says that I lack the necessary casting stat.

[AlexIII]

Of course that if devs give us fixes, the class will be viable. But the problem is that they think that there are not problems, and so wizards will be worse to every update. Really the needed fixes are not drastic: they need free metamagic in epics, a small but not big boost in dps (a burst dps, I think--if arcane tempest was better designed would do the trick...), a bigger spellbook en epics (for example, in heroics I can use banishment and works very well, in epic I can't; charms, the same, etc… devs, modify the epic ward, we need more spells working in epics, and let us not focus so heavy in only 2 schools, wizards should be good with all schools!), and some debuffs that work in bosses- it's all. But while devs don't want to do changes, the wizard is doomed in the current ddo.

And now the warlock, with the same spells, the same niche, better mana efficiency, better DC, free and better dps... how not think that the wizard is dead?

With at least 9 out of 10 responses (save this train of thought, which though off topic i think is important and relevant enough to stay) saying how warlock is OP, I would expect them to get nerfed before live. If not, it is going to be hard not to give up on DDO until things change. If warlock is released as is... more than the wizard is dead. Until warlock is released, its OP-ness doesn't finish the wizard.

Right now on live, wizards are under-powered, but manageable.

With a few fixes (that I expect would take a coder less than half an hour to implement) I agree arcane tempest should be updated, but we should see the wizards main power in his(or her) spells-- its a wizard after all. A boost in DC's across the board based of spell-craft would be thematically appropriate and let them be decent in off schools, and not need to put as many resources to great at a school, letting them have 3-4 great schools and a few good schools. Similarly a fraction of spell-craft mod as stacking spell point cost reduction would make sense, and solve the not enough sp problem. Giving double implement bonus and a stacking bonus to universal spellpower equal to spell-craft would give a decent damage boost (at cap spellpower should be near, if not at 300 without meta-magics for another 225... lets call it 500 for simplicity. With +24 (+8 implement added again) and +80 from doubled spellcraft(24 ranks spellcraft, 25 int mod at 60, +8 epic skills, +17 spellcraft item, exceptional +6 int skills), you have a new 604 instead of 500. ~ 20% boost to damage. if we were to say, add 1/20 spell-craft modifier to all DC's, you'd have +4 to off school saves (20% percentage points more likely for the spell to work). With battle arcanist and no other sp cost reduction, most of my DC spells cost less than 5 sp more than base, sometimes less and +20 with empower and maximize. (not counting quicken). a (spellcraft)/2 reduction to metamagic costs (applied first) or a spellcraft/4 discount to all costs. (or bonus to sp pool, makes no real difference) would solve that problem. No new mechanics need to be added, its thematically appropriate for wizards to get good bonuses for being skilled, as opposed to faith and intuition based casters. Turbine can even use the old open-book icon for the ability. Heck, there have been patches larger than this.

Id like to see a redesign of red and puprle named enemies to make them less of a 'spam abilities untill they die' for everyone, maybe let all debuffs apply but wear off twice as fast?

[Uska]

Is it wrong of me to hope that you don't find a way to implement alignments on pacts? I'd really just hate to be forced into Fey if I want to multi-class paladin :rolleyes:

That shouldn't even really be possible there shouldn't be paly/warlocks or monk/warlock if they can't go with pact I hope they make them all non-lawful

[Nascoe]

You know I played with Warlock in Lammania? No you do not.

You know the influence to which I referred was on the Wizards. No you do not know, maybe some deficiency in text interpretation.

You know I'm already on my third life playing with Wizards mellee? No you do not.

You know that I play in Cannith? No you do not. By the way, arguing about server is already irrelevant that what you see in the forum is the increasingly growing demand for merger servers, but that you do not know.

Do you know what country I reside? You know of my schedules and commitments to work and college? Do not you DO NOT KNOW!

You know I'm in a guild level 100+? You know the schedules of the players this guild? No you do not.

You know that EH is easy for me, without challenge and NO FUN? No you do not know!

The only thing u know is that EK is not a big tree, it is a tree of ****. Tenser toogle? Ridiculous, since u need 5 levels of Wizard and can use tenser scroll. Great benefit to mixed melee builds spend many AP this tree.

Do not blame me, continue playing with his friends, congratulations

OK, ...

Lets get back to your first post I reacted to. You complained how the Warlock hurt your chances of getting into LFMs on Live (Or were you talking about Lfms on Lammania????) and how you therefore "have" to run quests solo and failing to run them on EE with your wizard because he wouldn't be accepted into groups.

As the Warlock is not on live, surely Warlock is not the reason for not being let into LFMs. The EK tree has little to do with the Warlock, so if you are bringing up a discussion about that tree, THIS is not the place - Edit: a better place to discuss the power of wizards - https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/461206-Magical-Damage-in-Epic#post5627038
If you have trouble solo-ing EE WGU (as you mentioned you have, but I guess thats not true, as you now state EH is too easy, pick one) I advised you to look for people to play with (guild, on your server etc - not my concern, I was giving you a tip where to look), or to play solo on easier settings. Still it has not much to do with this Warlock discussion.

Maybe its just my mistake for not understanding that you are not a native speaker and you meant to give your EXPECTATION of what will happen in the future because you think Warlock will be far too good? If so, then I am sorry for misunderstanding and giving you tips where/how to find people to play with.
Still, if you are in a guild, I would seriously be surprised if you suddenly won't be able to find groups after Warlock gets introduced, surely your guild mates would still play with you.

Yes, I also see some issues with Warlock and how it can just keep on blasting at low lvls and has the potential to trump Wizards on power in the hands of an experienced player. But its more helpful if we bring up concrete things where we see issues that the devs can/should/might look at to hammer out a nice class that will be interesting to play but not too powerful or meh.

[Lorianna]

16 levels of Warlock, but your aura was only hitting for 35ish? Either you did something wrong, or something was very bugged. Even your lowest hits should be in the 200's after adding everything together.

Yeah, it was bugged apparently. My pact wasn't doing anything (even though I had it turned on). Logged back in again today and it's working now, so it seems a bit better. The pure warlock still seems more powerful, though, especially with the chain-blast toggle on. I melt entire groups of mobs in seconds.

[Gralhota]

OK, ...

Lets get back to your first post I reacted to. You complained how the Warlock hurt your chances of getting into LFMs on Live (Or were you talking about Lfms on Lammania????) and how you therefore "have" to run quests solo and failing to run them on EE with your wizard because he wouldn't be accepted into groups.

As the Warlock is not on live, surely Warlock is not the reason for not being let into LFMs. The EK tree has little to do with the Warlock, so if you are bringing up a discussion about that tree, THIS is not the place - Edit: a better place to discuss the power of wizards - https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/461206-Magical-Damage-in-Epic#post5627038
If you have trouble solo-ing EE WGU (as you mentioned you have, but I guess thats not true, as you now state EH is too easy, pick one) I advised you to look for people to play with (guild, on your server etc - not my concern, I was giving you a tip where to look), or to play solo on easier settings. Still it has not much to do with this Warlock discussion.

Maybe its just my mistake for not understanding that you are not a native speaker and you meant to give your EXPECTATION of what will happen in the future because you think Warlock will be far too good? If so, then I am sorry for misunderstanding and giving you tips where/how to find people to play with.
Still, if you are in a guild, I would seriously be surprised if you suddenly won't be able to find groups after Warlock gets introduced, surely your guild mates would still play with you.

Yes, I also see some issues with Warlock and how it can just keep on blasting at low lvls and has the potential to trump Wizards on power in the hands of an experienced player. But its more helpful if we bring up concrete things where we see issues that the devs can/should/might look at to hammer out a nice class that will be interesting to play but not too powerful or meh.


EH is not challenging for me because I have decent gear and 3 lives of Wizard, +5 INT tomes, no problem with the EH problem is EE.

My statement about LFMs was about the impact that will have on the Warlock Wizard obviously this will happen in U26. About Lammania, it was just a mention that I created a Warlock soon as I saw how it works.

Example: Why would anyone accept a Wizard CC if the Warlock can use CC and has a better DPS and free? Note that without enough to CC DC (EE) a Wizard is even more Useless, as wizards DCs are **** in the case of DPS.

About EE difficulty is the same for all, lack DPS. I can use my 2 enchantment spells (Hold mass and disco ball except TEE to which I do not want to buy so do not know about the difficulty of DCs from there).
Remove the mana bar, let the magic with free use as cleaves and etc ... I'll get solar EE, be long because of the DPS of the problem but could do, but this will not happen then I will complain or stop gambling , what ever.

I do not play with people from my guild, I like to play the quests / raids and like the end game (which does not currently exist). My guild mates are doing TRs without stopping, that is meaningless to me I do not have 14 years to spend as much time in a game and I like to play other games as well.

About EK I told you it was OFF TOPIC and it was one of my appeal, since the feedback from the tree testing date has not been heard, including other players have created far more creative trees, fun and better (efficiency) did not see ideas They are explored.

Yes everything I said was about the future, Wizard is a class dead will begin to be buried once if things do not change. In the last two months I returned to DDO I spend more time reading the forum and waiting for good news than playing, I was at least a 4-5 months without playing for the reasons already mentioned by all Wizards.

I do not know if it exists, but if there are server transfer to please my characters transifira for a populated server (if any) and will stop complaining or getting back months playing other games waiting for the miracle of a next update. Particurlamente I am in favor of fusion server in Cannith always play with the same people that has several ALTS cities are ghosts away from even this looks like MMO.

Sorry for my writing, I can not speak English, but I think now there's no doubt about what I meant. Warlocks will start digging the grave of the already sick Wizards especially.

Warlocks are poorly designed considering the current state of the Wizard that will help it to get worse.

[richieelias27]

Yeah, it was bugged apparently. My pact wasn't doing anything (even though I had it turned on). Logged back in again today and it's working now, so it seems a bit better. The pure warlock still seems more powerful, though, especially with the chain-blast toggle on. I melt entire groups of mobs in seconds.

It all depends on what your melee build brings to the table.

I was able to build a 16 lock/4 bard and give it the same ridiculous Swashbuckler melee damage with the added boost of the warlock aura. Granted, had I been a cleric/SB my heals wouldve been better. And had I been a Wiz/SB I might have had a bit more survivability, but don't underestimate that Aura. It has some very good passive buffs on it that effect the entire party and stack with everything.

[Grace_ana]

So far I have played with fey and fiend. I'll hit up great old ones perhaps next week.

Fey: I was underwhelmed. The floaty damage was kind of annoying. Having to put skill points in both spellpower and perform, and perform not being a class skill, is also irritating. It might be in part that I don't necessarily prefer a crowd control playstyle, which is fey's strength, but I also felt like I was too spread out between skill points, evocation and enchantment, etc. It would probably be easier on a toon that had a lot of lives and gear, but since the character copy isn't working for me I didn't have that option.

Fiend: This was a lot more fun for me. I like the spell list, and I never felt that I was lacking on my DCs. It has a nice mix of crowd control and damage spells, so it's a bit more flexible. I had a bit of trouble, though, because I did not notice my spellpower affecting my fire damage, and IIRC it's supposed to. I'm not even sure it's affecting my force damage. I also noticed that the spell power isn't calculating correctly on the character sheet, so it might be a lammania issue? Or maybe kobold just hates me in particular. I don't know, but unless it is fixed for live I wouldn't play one on live. That spellpower boost is necessary for epic levels for sure.

Tainted Scholar:
I spent my points primarily here, since enlightened doesn't really appeal to me for a warlock. (I dipped into ES for the stuff I wanted.) I know a lot of people said that the chain was way OP. After playing with it pretty extensively, I don't agree. I don't think it does any more damage than chain lightning, and that's been in the game forever. I recall clearing rooms on my sorc with chain lightning pretty much throughout heroic. And when you also consider that the chain isn't affected by metamagics, it actually is a bit underpowered in later heroic levels. I think given warlock's very limited spell selection and squishiness, it's important for them to have a really solid "hit all the things" blast shape, or they're just going to be pew-pewing low damage shots at monsters one at a time, and that's annoying.

General warlock stuff:
I got 80 base hp at level 20, so it is definitely calculating 1d4 instead of the 1d6 it should be. I haven't played with it in epic levels yet, but I feel that metas should apply to the EB, at least some, to help boost it up and make it viable through end game EE. I know a lot of people were complaining about the long beginning animation; having quicken apply would help with that.

Recommendations:
1. Change the floaty animation for fey if you can at this late point.
2. Make perform a class skill.
3. Check to make sure spellpower is applying correctly.
4. Make it 1d6 for hp.
5. Make at least some metas apply.

[Iriale]

So far I have played with fey and fiend. I'll hit up great old ones perhaps next week.

Fey: Having to put skill points in both spellpower and perform, and perform not being a class skill, is also irritating.

Recommendations:

2. Make perform a class skill.

Have not you noticed that actually perform is higher than spellcraft? The warlock has great charisma, and in the end that makes perform higher than spellcraft, who adds intelligence mod. It is fortunate that fey pact has sonic as damage... sonic is almost never resisted and also receives more spellpower by perform.

[slarden]

-souleater has a blast upgrade that aplies a 1 fort save debuff on enemies you hit with blasts ranged spells that stacks 4 times for a total of 4 dc
- souleater has a 2 sec cd for a shaken effect for 2 more dc, making it very nice in rotation with finger sla
-taken cookies give 2 charisma, there is no stacking int unique cookie in game
-souleater has a nice buff in tier 3 that gives d2+8 charisma buff that is insigh, if we average it to 4+d2 so lets say 5/6 it is still head by 2-3 points giving potential 2-3 dc above wizz /you still want shadowcaster instead of 4 int armor imo.
- depravity clickie that gives 2 dc for 20 seconds every 60 seconds, goes very nice with cds on wail circle finger

Excellent analysis.

Don't understimate the debuffing power of death aura + lesser death aura + necromancy augmentation. That is something uniquely wizard and when followed up with a wail with high save enemies can really be a game changer.

The finger of death SLA + spell point regen is tier 5 of soul eater is definitely nice and the sp regen extends the warlock sp pool significantly. This is possibly too powerful of a combo to have in tier 5, but I am not 100% sure because to take it you have to give up tier 5 of Tainted Scholar and that tree is really good too.

I am not seeing the charisma bonus in tier 3 and would appreciate more clarification on that - it appears I am missing something, but the debuff to opponent con does help in difficult content. Of course like mind fog it's basically a double save so when doing the math the main benefit occurs when DC is less effective. Unlike Mind Fog it appears to be a single target debuff rather than aoe debuff. I always prefer aoe debuffs.

I agree taken cookies is advantage, but it's a consumable that can't be sustained. I wouldn't count that. At best it will be used for EE raids and if used sparingly is a very slight advantage - but not enough to choose one class over another.

I am guessing few warlocks will prep targets with 4 blast for the debuff. This might be useful in difficult content - but I would not count this as 4 dc. If I am going to have to cast a bunch of spells to prep a monster I am going a different direction with my build.

Angelic form in Exalted Angel adds one DC with no downside. That is a another advantage for Warlock.

One of the problems warlocks will have is fitting all the feats in. They can dump evocation DC but then their eld blast pew pew is poo poo. It's only part of the damage, but still a significant dps loss if you dump evocation.

[Blackheartox]

Excellent analysis.

Don't understimate the debuffing power of death aura + lesser death aura + necromancy augmentation. That is something uniquely wizard and when followed up with a wail with high save enemies can really be a game changer.

The finger of death SLA + spell point regen is tier 5 of soul eater is definitely nice and the sp regen extends the warlock sp pool significantly. This is possibly too powerful of a combo to have in tier 5, but I am not 100% sure because to take it you have to give up tier 5 of Tainted Scholar and that tree is really good too.

I am not seeing the charisma bonus in tier 3 and would appreciate more clarification on that - it appears I am missing something, but the debuff to opponent con does help in difficult content. Of course like mind fog it's basically a double save so when doing the math the main benefit occurs when DC is less effective. Unlike Mind Fog it appears to be a single target debuff rather than aoe debuff. I always prefer aoe debuffs.

I agree taken cookies is advantage, but it's a consumable that can't be sustained. I wouldn't count that. At best it will be used for EE raids and if used sparingly is a very slight advantage - but not enough to choose one class over another.

I am guessing few warlocks will prep targets with 4 blast for the debuff. This might be useful in difficult content - but I would not count this as 4 dc. If I am going to have to cast a bunch of spells to prep a monster I am going a different direction with my build.

Angelic form in Exalted Angel adds one DC with no downside. That is a another advantage for Warlock.

One of the problems warlocks will have is fitting all the feats in. They can dump evocation DC but then their eld blast pew pew is poo poo. It's only part of the damage, but still a significant dps loss if you dump evocation.

What i plan to do mainly on first warlock of 3 on main is to see how sorc playstyle would apply on warlock, aka enchant + burst high nuke combo.
And since they plan to add 2 feats per 20% critical spell damage, 2nd thing i will try is a shiradi warlock to see how much potential blasts have when fully amped by critical damage.

I would be most happy to try that stuff out on lama tho and do proper builds on live ;)

At least for blasts, i plan to use a blast before every hold, just to get rid of the + saves vs magic when at full hp.
Tho personally i think warlock wont have any issues with enchant vs full hp full save bonus mobs in almost every content

[slarden]

What i plan to do mainly on first warlock of 3 on main is to see how sorc playstyle would apply on warlock, aka enchant + burst high nuke combo.
And since they plan to add 2 feats per 20% critical spell damage, 2nd thing i will try is a shiradi warlock to see how much potential blasts have when fully amped by critical damage.

I would be most happy to try that stuff out on lama tho and do proper builds on live ;)

At least for blasts, i plan to use a blast before every hold, just to get rid of the + saves vs magic when at full hp.
Tho personally i think warlock wont have any issues with enchant vs full hp full save bonus mobs in almost every content

That is what I was thinking too - try out enchant/nuke, necromancy and shiradi to see how all 3 play out.

The 20% critical damage feats is definitely a creative way to to solve the scaling problem, but let's face it this will help out dc-dumping builds more than anything else. Those builds already have better DPS and typically a better critical %. They also have room for 2 more feats.

That change almost sends me back to the drawing board on warlock because of how tight I am on feats.

[Blackheartox]

That is what I was thinking too - try out enchant/nuke, necromancy and shiradi to see how all 3 play out.

The 20% critical damage feats is definitely a creative way to to solve the scaling problem, but let's face it this will help out dc-dumping builds more than anything else. Those builds already have better DPS and typically a better critical %. They also have room for 2 more feats.

That change almost sends me back to the drawing board on warlock because of how tight I am on feats.

Yep its directly a buff to shiradi builds, i made a projection of a 12 warlock 6 wiz 2 fsoul and all benefits that build gets from that proposal.

Counter proposal was to add crit damage to destiny cores.
Shiradi get a buff via caster levels, and pure dc casters get a buff via spell critical damage.
Also that way no need to spend feats that are tight on dc casters on new spell crit damage feats.

I would not propose that usually, but since they alrdy plan to tinker with cores of destinies, that means they have the tools to do so, so why not just add crit damage to those? 7% per core for a total of 42%, for example for draconic, around 30% for exalted (to not give so much synergy for exalted sorcs), around 35-40 for magister, around 30-40 for primal, around 20 for crusader and 0 for shiradi.
Could be better modified but that was a simple idea, that is alrdy imo better then what was suggested to us

If i personally was asked i would also add like 4-5 passive dc to magister cores while at it.
Why? Because let magisters at least be best dc casters heh

[IconicHero]

I assume not being able to swap pacts with fred is a known issue? I suppose it applies to FvS too, wouldn't it?

like the favorite soul who get multiple bonus based on his pick say sov host fey get multi bonuses based on there pact don't think the mechanic it would take to change all at once to multiply levels is that easy to create for all those granted feats

[dunklezhan]

Have not you noticed that actually perform is higher than spellcraft? The warlock has great charisma, and in the end that makes perform higher than spellcraft, who adds intelligence mod. It is fortunate that fey pact has sonic as damage... sonic is almost never resisted and also receives more spellpower by perform.

Would it be terrible if the fae pact made Perform a class skill? Maybe it removes one of your other Cha based class skills as a trade off? The other pacts must have something similar they could do. You still have to spread your skillpoints to get them, I don't know that this would be terrible.

I'd suggest it be tied to core enhancements (pure 20 warlock ending up with +5 perform from a particular tree), but the effect then is that you just end up making one of the trees the 'fae tree' which kinda defeats the points of pacts and trees being separate.

Though for the reasons you specify, and the fact that there's always perform gear, human racials or elf dilettente skill boosts, skill focus feats if you want, past lives etc etc etc. I don't really know that it not being a class skill is more than an annoyance really.

[SirValentine]

Another secondary caster (only 6 spell levels) class is going to get stupidly high spell DCs, higher than the full caster classes?




No.

How can you say that? The breakdowns have already been done. Fine, I'll rehash some points of comparison:

Warlock:
16 DC base
+5 20 starting Charisma
+3 DC from Tainted
+2 effective DC from Aura
+5.5 from 11 Cha from enhancements
+4 from 8 Cha from ED
--
35.5

Druid or Cleric, say:
19 DC base
+4 18 starting Wisdom
+4 from 8 Wis from enhancements
+3 from 6 Wis from ED
+0.5 from an extra Wisdom by twisting Acute Instincts versus straight +1 stat
--
30.5

(Not included: things that are identical in both, like feats, gear, etc..)

Yes, they can make up a couple points only in specific schools, but not 5 points worth. Yes, FvS can get 2 from their Aura, and 1 to a single school, but still not 5 points worth.

You could straight-up remove all the DC buffs from Tainted ("to make up for only having 6 spell levels"), and Warlocks are STILL ahead on DC of full-blown primary caster classes.

[Grace_ana]

I forgot to add to my run-down that aura of courage is not granting immunity to fear like it is supposed to. I was fear-frozen several times in heroic lords of dust. (Yes, it was fear, not doom or shaken.)

[Jarlos]

-souleater has a nice buff in tier 3 that gives d2+8 charisma buff that is insigh



As far as i know, no.




Souleater

Tier Three

Dark Feeding: (2 AP) Multi-selector: Choose a magical attack with a cooldown of 16 seconds. Enemies can negate the ability score damage (but not your ability score gain) with a Will saving throw: DC of 14 + Character Level + Charisma Modifier. These effects do not stack with themselves.

Your Flesh is Weak: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Strength damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Strength for 20 seconds.
You Cannot Evade Me: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Dexterity damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Dexterity for 20 seconds.
Your Will is Mine: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Wisdom damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Wisdom for 20 seconds.
Food For Thought: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Intelligence damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Intelligence for 20 seconds.
Blood Feast: Activate this ability to cause 1d8+2 Constitution damage to your opponent for 20 seconds. You gain an Insight bonus of 1d8+2 Constitution for 20 seconds.


Sev~

[slarden]

How can you say that? The breakdowns have already been done. Fine, I'll rehash some points of comparison:

Warlock:
16 DC base
+3 DC from Tainted
+2 effective DC from Aura
+5.5 from 11 Cha from enhancements
+4 from 8 Cha from ED
--
30.5

Druid or Cleric, say:
19 DC base
+4 from 8 Wis from enhancements
+3 from 6 Wis from ED
--
26

(Not included: things that are identical in both, like feats, gear, etc..)

Yes, they can make up a couple points only in specific schools, but not 4.5 points worth. Yes, FvS can get 2 from their Aura, and 1 to a single school, but still not 4.5 points worth.

You could straight-up remove all the DC buffs from Tainted ("to make up for only having 6 spell levels"), and Warlocks are STILL ahead on DC of full-blown primary caster classes.

Warlock also gains 2 from racial charisma starting point. Cleric has 2 DC in their tree Druid has 1 DC in their tree so it's 31.5 to 28 and 27.

So comparing it to the 28, differences are:
1: stat starting point from race selection
1/2: racial enh tree
1: 2 stat bonus in capstone
1: Angelic presence

I don't think this tells the whole story though. Human gains a feat so that eliminates 1 DC difference since warlock is feat starved and can't fit everything in.

If you look in my sig you can see my DC warlock caster and DC druid caster and what is very obvious is the superior DC a druid already has - not to mention that the save is going against reflex save which on average is lower than fortitude and lower than will saves. I am assuming spell penetration will once again matter with eShavarath and eVale and that is really going to create tough feat choices for warlocks.

An evoker cleric likewise will be able to get a significantly better DC than warlock for the same exact reasons. A necro cleric might have a lower DC, but I don't think clerics/druids have to be equal or better than warlocks at everything. If warlocks had earthquake and implosion it would be different because they can max out one school for everything like druids do and like most divines do.

Warlocks have to build for evocation for basically 1 thing - pact eld blast damage. Then they need to build for a primary school on top of that and those primary schools mostly require spell penetration. This makes warlock an extremely feat-starved class and the trade-offs made are huge. How is a warlock going to fit in the 2 new epic spell crit damage feats Varg proposed? Things will have to be given up to fit those in - very important things.

[SirValentine]

Warlock also gains 2 from racial charisma starting point.


Good point, I forgot that. I'll edit it in.



Cleric has 2 DC in their tree Druid has 1 DC in their tree so it's 31.5 to 28 and 27.


Single school, and I did mention it. But before we we start getting into specific single schools, I wanted to get the baseline as it applies across all spells.



I don't think this tells the whole story though. Human gains a feat so that eliminates 1 DC difference since warlock is feat starved and can't fit everything in.


I call BS. EVERY SINGLE PRIMARY CASTER except Wizard is feat-starved...and can still fit in all the DC-boosting feats just fine. Even Completionist. And not everyone will even have Completionist or Arcane Initiate as an option. But both are options equally open to all classes.



If you look in my sig you can see my DC warlock caster and DC druid caster and what is very obvious is the superior DC a druid already has...
...
An evoker cleric likewise will be able to get a significantly better DC than warlock for the same exact reasons.


Sorry, I have no interest in your apples-to-oranges comparisons. An Evoker Warlock is still ahead on DC over similar Evoker Druid or Cleric.

The fact that Evocation & Conjuration as schools have more DC-boosting options than other schools is independent of class.

[richieelias27]

Warlocks have to build for evocation for basically 1 thing - pact eld blast damage. Then they need to build for a primary school on top of that and those primary schools mostly require spell penetration. This makes warlock an extremely feat-starved class and the trade-offs made are huge. How is a warlock going to fit in the 2 new epic spell crit damage feats Varg proposed? Things will have to be given up to fit those in - very important things.

Why do you *have* to build for evocation? I would argue that evocation is actually the LAST place you should specialize in. Only the Pact portion (a smaller portion) of Warlock EB damage benefits from evocation. Even then, unless you went Fey you will always get at least half of that damage. I'd wager that +2 DC from feats is not going to make or break you Warlocks EB damage. Much better off specializing in both Necro and Enchantment, or a single school + spell pen.

Heck, if anything Warlocks are less feat starved than other casters due to the fact that their blasts are not affected in any way by maximize or empower. If you aren't building for the Eldritch Bursts from the ES tree, you can just drop those two feats completely. +2 feats over most casters.

[slarden]

I call BS. EVERY SINGLE PRIMARY CASTER except Wizard is feat-starved...and can still fit in all the DC-boosting feats just fine. Even Completionist. And not everyone will even have Completionist or Arcane Initiate as an option. But both are options equally open to all classes.

Take a look at my warlock and druid builds. Once you have to start building for DC and spell penetration it's a game changer. I realize druid and cleric CAN build for other schools besides evocation, but they have great spell options for evocation and warlocks do not.



Sorry, I have no interest in your apples-to-oranges comparisons. An Evoker Warlock is still ahead on DC over similar Evoker Druid or Cleric.

The fact that Evocation & Conjuration as schools have more DC-boosting options than other schools is independent of class.

Tell me what spells an evoker warlock will use? They have Eld Blast basically and it's their primary source of DPS so they have to build for it or they lose a significant amount. What else do the have besides that?

If you look at the break down above, most of the differences you are raising are independent from class. 1.5 DC from race. 1 DC from Angelic Presence and so the only difference is 1 DC in enhancement tree for Cleric and 2 for Druid which is basically 2 extra stat in the capstone + 1 DC for druid.

Still, if you look at my warlock build (built for DC and spell pen) vs. my druid build in my sig, I fail to see where druids are behind. My druid can fit in more DC boosting feats because of human and the fact that I don't need spell penetration. I am missing no DC boosting feats on my druid and 3 on my warlock build. My druid has superior passive debuffing that requires no real effort or change in game play.

These are real builds I made and not theory-crafting and I think it shows the feat problem a warlock has if they want to build for spell penetration and evocation DC in addition to the primary school DC.

[slarden]

Why do you *have* to build for evocation? I would argue that evocation is actually the LAST place you should specialize in. Only the Pact portion (a smaller portion) of Warlock EB damage benefits from evocation. Even then, unless you went Fey you will always get at least half of that damage. I'd wager that +2 DC from feats is not going to make or break you Warlocks EB damage. Much better off specializing in both Necro and Enchantment, or a single school + spell pen.

Heck, if anything Warlocks are less feat starved than other casters due to the fact that their blasts are not affected in any way by maximize or empower. If you aren't building for the Eldritch Bursts from the ES tree, you can just drop those two feats completely. +2 feats over most casters.

Everything is a build choice of course. You could make the same argument that boosting evocation DC by 3 for the cost of 1 enchantment DC is not a big deal because that 1 DC isn't going to hurt you much. I viewed 3 evocation DC gained for 1 enchantment DC lost was ok.

I have the build in my sig. The original build didn't have an evocation focus feat, draconic twist or an evocation focus item. After playtesting on Lamannia I made the change. Losing half from your pact damage is a significant loss of damage.

Maximize and Empower still are used by some of the SLAs in the enhancement trees, divine wrath and curse moderate wounds SLA. Again, there are many build choices, but warlock dps gets really bad once you dump evocation, maximize and empower. A class should have a DC that is a few points higher if their DPS is that bad. That would even be worse than palemaster.

[richieelias27]

Everything is a build choice of course. You could make the same argument that boosting evocation DC by 3 for the cost of 1 enchantment DC is not a big deal because that 1 DC isn't going to hurt you much. I viewed 3 evocation DC gained for 1 enchantment DC lost was ok.

I have the build in my sig. The original build didn't have an evocation focus feat, draconic twist or an evocation focus item. After playtesting on Lamannia I made the change. Losing half from your pact damage is a significant loss of damage.

Maximize and Empower still are used by some of the SLAs in the enhancement trees, divine wrath and curse moderate wounds SLA. Again, there are many build choices, but warlock dps gets really bad once you dump evocation, maximize and empower. A class should have a DC that is a few points higher if their DPS is that bad. That would even be worse than palemaster.

I still maintain that the boost you get to pact dps is an incredibly meager use of 2 feats. And again with cure moderate, by the time you start needing large amounts of self healing, you have cocoon which outperforms it by a large margin.

Now I'm sure there are reasons to build evocation based, but pact damage is a very flimsy one in my opinion.

[slarden]

I still maintain that the boost you get to pact dps is an incredibly meager use of 2 feats. And again with cure moderate, by the time you start needing large amounts of self healing, you have cocoon which outperforms it by a large margin.

Now I'm sure there are reasons to build evocation based, but pact damage is a very flimsy one in my opinion.

So you are basically proposing a 30% dps reduction to gain a few dc? I am sorry but this makes no sense at all. DPS is more important than DC in the current game and completely dumping DPS as you suggest is a very poor choice based on my Lamannia playtesting.

[richieelias27]

So you are basically proposing a 30% dps reduction to gain a few dc? I am sorry but this makes no sense at all. DPS is more important than DC in the current game and completely dumping DPS as you suggest is a very poor choice based on my Lamannia playtesting.

2 evocation DC is not a 30% dps reduction. Period. Full stop.

The only way you lose 30% of your dps is if they save EVERY SINGLE TIME *AND* saving means you do zero damage (i.e., you took fey... which was silly. shame on you. oh, and you're running that quest that does not exist where every single enemy has evasion.)

Oh, and guess what? In that mythical scenario where your evo dc is so terribad that everything saves.... +2 DC was not going to help you anyway because you built a suck character.

[slarden]

2 evocation DC is not a 30% dps reduction. Perios. Full stop.

I am getting 3 DC from the 1 evocation feat which was exchanged for 1 enchantment feat (due to the draconic twist) and you previously said


I would argue that evocation is actually the LAST place you should specialize in.

and you said



Heck, if anything Warlocks are less feat starved than other casters due to the fact that their blasts are not affected in any way by maximize or empower. .

So taking away maximize and empower and evocation DC that is easily a 30% dps reduction - easily.

Did you actually test a DC Warlock on Lamannia because it doesn't sound like it.

[richieelias27]

Reading failure. I am getting 3 DC from the 1 evocation feat due to the draconic twist and you said I didn't need maximize/empower. That is easily a 30% dps reduction - easily.

Did you actually test a DC Warlock on Lamannia because it doesn't sound like it.

Do try to stay on point.


Warlocks have to build for evocation for basically 1 thing - pact eld blast damage.
The argument here is that Pact damage (cannot be empowered or maximized) is not worth taking evo feats for. I already stated that there may be other reasons for building for evocation. Pact damage is NOT one.

If you are taking epic spells/energy burst and plan on spamming them for your main source of damage, then by all means, go evo. It really does suck when they save on those.

If instead you are going Magister and looking to use the majority of your spellpoints on Wail/finger/circle, or utilizing the freebie mass confusion and leaving the damage entirely to your eldritch blasts... ditch evocation. IN THIS SCENARIO (which is the one you proposed by the way; that Eldritch Blast is where your dps comes from) those two feats account for, at best, approximately 20% of 30% (6%. 9% if you also blow a twist on it...) Heck, you'd get more mileage out of skill focus:spellpower....

[slarden]

Do try to stay on point. The argument here is that Pact damage (cannot be empowered or maximized) is not worth taking evo feats for. I already stated that there may be other reasons for building for evocation. Pact damage is NOT one.

If you are taking epic spells/energy burst and plan on spamming them for your main source of damage, then by all means, go evo.

If instead you are going Magister and looking to use the majority of your spellpoints on Wail/finger/circle, or utilizing the freebie mass confusion and leaving the damage entirely to your eldritch blasts... ditch evocation. IN THIS SCENARIO (which is the one you proposed by the way; that Eldritch Blast is where your dps comes from) those two feats account for, at best, approximately 20% of 30%. (6%). Heck, you'd get more mileage out of skill focus:spellpower....

How can I you keep changing the point. First you said evocation was the least important thing to a warlock. Then you said a warlock was not feat starved because they didn't need empower and maximize. The combination of that is a huge dps loss - easily 30%.

Now you are saying there are other reasons to build for evocation besides pact damage. Can you list those reasons?

Now you are saying energy burst uses evocation DC - wrong again it goes off charisma. You are saying evocation will help with epic spells. Which epic spells is that? I am sorry but you are wrong on all the facts.

Bottom line is that I have a warlock build and a druid build in my sig that shows the problem warlock has with feats when spell penetration is required - presumably eshavarath. If spell penetration ends up being marginalized forever that is a different story.

Did you actually play a warlock DC caster on Lamannia because I don't think you did.

[AMADHA]

Make a Warlock - play with it - let us know what you experience!

This is a good thread for general thoughts and discussion. If you have specific feedback, feel free to visit our Lamannia Warlock Forum here. (https://www.ddo.com/forums/forumdisplay.php/279-Warlock-Feedback)

Okay, I'm not much of a caster player but this area is a problem. You kind of need to be an experienced caster with a plan to play a Warlock. While the blast is cool and Master's Touch is REALLY helpful when starting off, later down the road when you have some nifty weapons you know how to use its pretty useless. Okay, so you want to swap it out, not a problem. Now wait three ACTUAL days to change any other spell!?? Man, NOT going to do it. I don't have a problem with the timer, just the number of spells I can change. How about 6 per change that's only 50% of the total number of spells a warlock can know. This makes more sense. Otherwise I think this will be a HUGE downside to this class.

[richieelias27]

How can I you keep changing the point. First you said evocation was the least important thing to a warlock. Then you said a warlock was not feat starved because they didn't need empower and maximize. The combination of that is a huge dps loss - easily 30%.

Now you are saying there are other reasons to build for evocation besides pact damage. Can you list those reasons?

Now you are saying energy burst uses evocation DC - wrong again it goes off charisma. You are saying evocation will help with epic spells. Which epic spells is that? I am sorry but you are wrong on all the facts.

Bottom line is that I have a warlock build and a druid build in my sig that shows the problem warlock has with feats when spell penetration is required - presumably eshavarath. If spell penetration ends up being marginalized forever that is a different story.

Did you actually play a warlock DC caster on Lamannia because I don't think you did.

Re-read my previous post. It's easy to find, but I'll help you anyway: it is right above yours. It answers every single one of your questions. I can't be bothered to re-post all that if you can't even be bothered to read it in the first place. Hellball and and Ruin can be Empowered/Maximized (makes the feats worth it. Otherwise you only have the one enhancement on an 18 second timer. woop de frikkin do. You could also get the bursts that share a timer with cleave, but at the moment those are a PITA to use while slinging blasts, and require points that could be better spent elsewhere. I.E. Tainted Scholar and Soul Eater) Energy burst was a brain fart.

And you know what? Now that you pose the question "What build is there that evocation DC is useful on with a pure warlock"... I honestly cannot think of one. I guess I just assumed that there would be. Makes my life easier not even having to think about dropping evocation. I mean I don't know about you, but 3% damage boost per feat just isn't worth it to me.

[slarden]

Re-read my previous post.

Here it is



If you are taking epic spells/energy burst and plan on spamming them for your main source of damage, then by all means, go evo.

[AMADHA]

From what I've seen so far I'd recommend warlock to someone who is new to DDO and hadn't played PnP.

Its a nice class for someone who wants to play a magic user and be able to start lobbing balls of magic from the get go.

I both agree and disagree. It is a fun class... kind of ranger, wizard, fighter blend and from that point I agree.... However, ranged attacks are not as long range nor aim as well as a bow; spells are a problem as I have stated elsewhere since you need to make good choices from the get go because changing them will be a nightmare (3 real days per spell from what I experienced); Aura's are a tad weird, and this shaping thing I've read about for the blast... didn't see it or I don't understand what is being said. HP's are poor for a class that seems to play better with Auras on and whacking with weapons. Selecting feats is kind of dumb as well, for example: a number of them are "Beguiling Defense?" (at least I think that is what it was called) that is the ONLY class feat you can select... so why isn't it just automatic and what does it really do BTW? Further, it doesn't multi-class well with the low skill point allotment. But it is the first class that actually FITS the Drow race to a 'T' bonus dex, int, and cha sweet things for a rogue/warlock TWF.

So for levels 1-6 I think its a good newbie class, but it gets to be a pain higher up when you head smack, I should have taken THAT spell instead, and regret starts to worm its way into your thoughts.

[richieelias27]

Here it is

Are you just being intentionally Obtuse?

At any rate. I made my point for anyone who is actually interested in the true worth of each point of evocation DC.

Assuming you are already in that goldilocks range that makes DC spells even worth boosting (hitting 50% of the time or better after gear for me. And interestingly enough, that is about where I am on EE on my lock on lamma with zero evocation feats/twists), each point of evocation DC is worth at best approximately 3% of your damage.

He was right about one thing, Pact damage accounts for about 30% of your EB damage. I have observed this while playing on Lamma, and that's just about right. So, lets say +1 evo DC brings you up from hitting 50% of the time to 55% of the time. 10% increase. 10% of 30% =3%. That feat plus a twist = 9%

For every bit higher than 50% you go, the less those feats are worth.

Personally, I prefer to twist in some spellpower and survivability while getting Ench/Necro DC as high as I can (Those do hurt to see them fail and do nothing at all)

Oh, and don't go Fey. Reflex save on your Eldritch blast is just ****... not to mention the added requirement of sonic spellpower and perform skill.